“It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself.”
Letter to Eugène Lefébure (February 1865), published in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (1988), p. 48.
Observations
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Stéphane Mallarmé 36
French Symbolist poet 1842–1898Related quotes
“The artist creates his own elite, and the elite its own artists.”
Source: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
“The beauty other people create is not for the artists. Artists have to live alone.”
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47
“The free artist creates without a commission.”
Source: Truth and Method (1960), p. 76
Context: The free artist creates without a commission. He seems distinguished by the complete independence of his creativity and thus acquires the characteristic social features of an outsider whose style of life cannot be measured by the standards of public morality. The concept of the bohemian which arose in the nineteenth century reflects this process. The home of the Gypsies became the generic word for the artist's way of life.
But at the same time the artist, who is as "free as a bird or a fish," bears the burden of a vocation that makes him an ambiguous figure. For a cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the "standpoint of art" can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a "secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.
“The artist works by locating the world in himself”
“An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.”
The Dagger with Wings (1926)
“In every work of art, the artist himself is present.”