“The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination, will be the greatest!”
Quoted in: Giles Auty (1977) The Art of Self-Deception: An Intelligible Guide, p. 88
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir44
French painter and sculptor 1841–1919Related quotes
Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All
Skinny Legs and All (1990)
Context: ... she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."
“Among the swans there is none called the least,
or the greatest.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
"Evidence"
Evidence (2009)
John Ruskin book Modern Painters
Volume I, part I, chapter II, section 9 (1843).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)
William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter
from Baziote's text for a symposium in 1954; as quoted in William Baziotes – paintings and drawings, ed. Michael Preble, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2004, p. 18
1950s
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
Inarticulate Touches
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting
“What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.”
Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time
Ce qu'on appelle la postérité, c'est la postérité de l'œuvre.
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919), Ch. I: "Madame Swann at Home"
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911