Charles Baudelaire Quotes on Art (14 Quotes)



    A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

    The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings -- woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

    In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

    If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.



    Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

    Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

    An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

    Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

    To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

    The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

    Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

    Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.


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