"Artistic Freedom"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)
Context: I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.
“I, who believe that every artist should be his own teacher, cannot dream of setting myself up as a professor.”
1860s, Realist Manifesto' - an open letter, 1861
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Gustave Courbet 30
French painter 1819–1877Related quotes
"Civilization," London and Westminster Review (April 1836)
Context: We are not so absurd as to propose that the teacher should not set forth his own opinions as the true ones and exert his utmost powers to exhibit their truth in the strongest light. To abstain from this would be to nourish the worst intellectual habit of all, that of not finding, and not looking for, certainty in any teacher. But the teacher himself should not be held to any creed; nor should the question be whether his own opinions are the true ones, but whether he is well instructed in those of other people, and, in enforcing his own, states the arguments for all conflicting opinions fairly.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 572.
Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html
Referenced
Source: Geschichte Meines Lebens
“Every artist writes his own autobiography.”
The New Spirit
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his picture.”
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 310