Frasi di Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Data di nascita: 25. Febbraio 1841
Data di morte: 3. Dicembre 1919
Altri nomi: Пьер Огюст Ренуар
Pierre-Auguste Renoir [pjɛʁ oˈgyst ʁəˈnwaʁ] è stato un pittore francese uno tra i massimi esponenti dell'impressionismo.
Frasi Pierre-Auguste Renoir
„Ogni tanto, bisogna tentare cose superiori alle proprie forze.“
da una lettera all'amico Paul Bérard
Senza fonte
„I am still going through an experimental stage. I'm not happy, and I keep scrubbing out and scrubbing out again. I hope this mania will pass... I'm like the children at school; the clean page has to be filled with good writing, and splash – a mess! I'm still making messes and I'm forty years old.“
Origine: 1880's, p. 169 : quote from Renoir's letter to his art-seller Durand-Ruel, 21st November 1881
„.. to express himself well, the artist should be hidden... The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur.“
Quoted in: Raymond Durgnat (1974) Jean Renoir: Raymond Durgnat, p. 370
undated quotes
„It was a perpetual holiday – and what an assortment of people. You could still enjoy yourself in those days! Machinery didn't take up the whole of life; there was time for living, and we made the most of it... I found as many magnificent girls to paint as I wanted; in those days one wasn't reduced to following a little model around for an hour and then being treated as a disgusting old man at the end of it.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 28 : Renoir's quote to Vollard referring to the Isle Grenouillere, where he painted in 1869, together with Claude Monet.
„I studied a good deal in the museum at Naples; the Pompeian paintings are extremely interesting from every aspect. So I am staying in the sun – not to paint portraits but while I am warming myself and looking hard at things I hope I will have acquired some of the grandeur and simplicity of the old masters. Raphael didn't work out-of-doors, but he studied the sunlight all the same – his frescoes are full of it. So, by looking around outside, I have finished by seeing only the broad harmonies, and am no longer preoccupied with the little details, which only extinguish the sunlight, instead of increasing its brilliance. I hope therefore, when I get back to Paris, to produce something which will be the outcome of all these general studies, and to give you the benefit of them“
in a letter written during his three-weeks-stay, working with Paul Cezanne at l'Estaque, near Marseille
Origine: 1880's, p. 169 in a letter to madame Charpentier, l'Estaque, January 1882
„They've found fault with me enough, in all conscience, for putting violet shadows on bodies.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 80 : Renoir to Vollard, referring to his color-use.
„Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 175 : Renoir's remarks to Vollard, referring to the delicate painting-style of Berthe Morisot's, the only French woman-artist of Paris Impressionism.
„People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 64 : Renoir's remark to Vollard referring to the Impressionist artists's Monet, Sisley and Pissarro.
„It gives my brain a rest, painting flowers. I don't feel the same tension as when I have a model in front of me. When I paint flowers, I put on colours and try out values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn't dare to do it with a figure; I'd be afraid of spoiling the whole thing. And the experience I gain this way is then applied to my pictures.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 196 : quote on painting flowers, to art-buyer George Riviere, who was watching a flower still-life of Renoir.
„Landscapes are useful to a figure painter, too; out-of-doors one uses colours one would never think of in the weaker studio light. But landscape painting is a thankless job; you waste half a day for the sake of one hour's painting. You only finish one painting out of ten, because the weather keeps changing. You start work on a sunlight effect and it comes on to rain – or you had a few clouds in the sky, and the wind blows them away. It's always the same story!“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 196 : on painting landscape in open air, to art-buyer George Riviere.
„I'm struggling with flowering trees [in Spring 1881, shortly after his Algeria trip] and with women and children. I keep feeling regretful, all the same – I think of all the trouble I have given you for nothing, and I wonder how long you will put up with my womanish whims; and through all I keep seeing those pretty English girls [Duret invited him to visit England]. What a misfortune, always to be so undecided! But it's at the root of my character, and I'm too old to change.“
Origine: 1880's, pp. 156-157 : a letter to Théodore Duret, March 1881
„I can manage very well with the first grubby backside [of the model] which comes along – provided I find a skin which takes the light well.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 150 : a quote from Vollard's book
„I wanted to tell you that in about 1883 there occurred a kind of break in my work. I had got to the end of 'Impressionism', and I had come to the conclusion that I didn't either how to paint or how to draw. In short, I had come to a dead end.“
Origine: undated quotes, p. 175 : Renoir's remark to Vollard.
„I went to see this picture [Raphael's painting 'Madonna della Sedia' which Renoir saw in Florence in 1882] just to have a good laugh – and I found myself in front of the most wonderfully free, solid, simple, alive painting it is possible to imagine – arms and legs of real flesh, and what a touching expression of maternal tenderness.“
Origine: 1880's, p. 161-162 : (1882), in a letter to Vollard
