Edgar Degas Quotes about Art

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means.

One does not marry art. One ravishes it.

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. If then two or three natural accents can be added, obviously no harm is done. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.

Art is really a battle.

One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.

I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.

I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

the moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.