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Quotes from The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas — Edgar Degas

1834–1917 France

← All quotes by Edgar Degas

11 quotes

Even working from nature you have to compose.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

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

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

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

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

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 Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas (1961)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Edgar Degas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.