Gustave Courbet famous quotes

03-23-2025

Fine art is knowledge made visible.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Made #Fine
Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Truth Is #Individual #Relative
Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Artist #Essence #Transcendentalism
I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Hands #Order
On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).
-- Gustave Courbet

#Funeral #Meditation #Criticism
France is the only nation in which astoundingly small numbers of civilized patrons reside.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Numbers #France #Civilized
The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Beautiful #Art #Reality
I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Prejudice #Sake
When I am dead, let it be said of me: he belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, and least of all, to any regime except the regime of liberty.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Freedom #School #Liberty
I too am a government.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Government #Independence
I have never seen either angels or goddesses, so I am not interested in painting them.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Angel #Painting #Goddess
Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Real #Painting
Without trying to clear up the degree of correctness of a qualification which no one, one must hope, will be asked to understand exactly, I will limit myself to a few words of explanation to cut short any misunderstandings.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Cutting #Trying #Degrees
Titles have never given a just idea of things; were it otherwise, the work would be superfluous.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Ideas #Titles #Would Be
Art or talent, for an artist, is merely a means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the things of the period in which he lives.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Mean #Ideas
I hope always to earn my living by my art without having ever deviated by even a hair's breadth from my principles... to please anyone or to sell more easily.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Hair #Principles
It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Mediocrity #Respectability
The state is not competent in artistic matters... When the state leaves us free, it will have carried out its duty.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Freedom #Matter #Artistic
I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is but the result of his own inspiration and his own study of past tradition.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Education #Art #Inspiration
To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them - in a word, to create a living art - this has been my aim.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Ideas #Able
When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important
-- Gustave Courbet

#Important #Controversial
Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Real #Painting
I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Angel #Paint #Show Me
Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Language #Art Is
The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Artist #Expression #Ratios
I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Knowing #Quests #Custody
I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
-- Gustave Courbet

#Art #Principles

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