Great Throughts Treasury

"My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent."

"My works are dear to me, each in its own way; I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgment. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there and it is no small sum."

"Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me."

"No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market ? where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber ? the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists."

"Now at least "artists have the upper hand" in the town (Vitebsk). They get totally engrossed in their disputes about art, I am utterly exhausted and 'dream' of 'abroad'? After all, there is no more suitable place for artists to be (for me, at least) than at the easel, and I dream of being able to devote myself exclusively to my pictures. Of course, little by little one paints something, but it?s not the real thing."

"One day a student asked Taiga, 'What is the most difficult part of painting?' Taiga answered, 'The part of the paper where nothing is painted is the most difficult.'"

"One fine day (but all days are fine) as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her, and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, 'Mama, I want to be a painter.'"

"One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss."

"Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love."

"Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.. ..It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort... It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West."

"Or is all this fuss actually important for ?art history ?? Oh, no, never. If things only ever originated as a result of such competition, it wouldn?t be worth living among them, like an accidental, capricious toy. Clearly there is a greater, a more serene and more modest power, but we are either too lazy to live by its laws, or we have no time, or it ?hurts too much?."

"The Jews might well, were they of such a mind (as I am, lament the disappearance of all those who painted the wooden synagogues in the small towns and villages (oh why haven?t I gone to my grave with them!), and the carvers of the wooden ?school mallets? ? ?quiet boy!? (and if you should see them in Ansky?s collection, you?ll get a shock!). But is there really any difference between my ancestor from Mohiliev, who painted the synagogue there, and myself, who painted the Jewish theatre in Moscow (and a good theatre it is at that)? ?I am convinced that, were I to stop shaving, you would see in me a deceptive likeness."

"The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet, and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root."

"The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament."

"The sun has only ever shone for me in France (it certainly did that!). I have got used to beating the streets of Paris, happy beyond words dreaming of a life 125 years long - with the Louvre radiant in the distance. (Chagall couldn?t go back to Paris because of the outbreak of the first World War, fh). Having ended up in the Russian provinces, ?I have decided to die ?."

"There you are, said Efros (Granovsky), leading me into a dark room, ?These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them?. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. ?You see?, he continued, ?the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there.? To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen.. ..And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them. The rooms and corridors were in the process of being repaired; piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread."

"Two or three o?clock in the morning (in his studio, around 1911, in ?La Ruche? an old factory where many artists as Soutine, Archipenko, L‚ger, Modigliani had their studio, fh). The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long. It?s already a week since the studio was cleaned out. Frames, eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins lie about higgledy-piggledy? On the shelves, reproductions of El Greco and C‚zanne lay next tot the remains of a herring I had cut in two, the head for the first day, the tail for the next, and Thank God, a few crusts of bread."

"We all know that a good person can be a bad artist. But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one."

"What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint."

"What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements."

"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art."

"When I painted his portrait and offered it to him, he glanced at the canvas, then, looking at himself in the mirror, thought a moment and said: Well, no! Keep it!"

"Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?"