25 quotes
I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.
In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.
I tried to be natural, in other words the exact opposite of what drawing teachers call 'faithful to nature'. I made my first experiments with free form.
I did exhibitions with the Surrealists [in Paris, c. 1929] because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
[art] urges man to identify himself with nature.
Abstract Art, Concrete Art (1942)
Each one of these bodies [art-works which Arp made] certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
Like the disposition of planes, the proportion of these planes and their colors seemed to depend only upon chance, and I declared that these works were ordered 'according to the law of chance', just like in the order of nature.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
It was Sophie who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in perfect equilibrium.
As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.. .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface.
Dada was given the Venus of Milo a clyster and has allowed the Laocoön and his sons to rest awhile, after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone.. ..[but] it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.. .[art must be like..] fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in it's mother's womb.
By the time I was 16, the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers at the Strasbourg School of Applied Art not only poisoned drawing for me but destroyed my taste for all artistic activity. I took refuge in poetry.
It was Sophie [Taeuber] who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.
Dadaism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled 'Laocoon and Sons' to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake. Dadaism has reduced positive and negative to utter nonsense. It has been destructive in order to achieve indifference.