“I always use a preliminary canvas the same size for a sketch as for a finished picture, and I always begin with color. With large canvases this is more fatiguing, but more logical. I may have the same sentiment I obtained in the first, but this lacks solidity, and a decorative sense. I never retouch a sketch; I take a new canvas the same size, as I may change the composition somewhat. But I always strive to give the same feeling, while carrying it on further. A picture should, for me, always be decorative. While working I never try to think, only to feel.
“I have a class of sixty pupils and make them draw accurately, as a student always should do at the beginning. I do not encourage them to work as I do now.”
When asked about a clay model of a nude woman with abnormal legs, he picked up a small Javanese statue with a head all out of proportion to the body and asked:
“Is not that beautiful?”
His interviewer answered, “I see no beauty where there is lack of proportion. To my mind no sculpture has ever equaled that of the Greeks, unless it be Michael Angelo’s.”
He replied: “But there you are, back to the classic, the formal. We of today are trying to express ourselves today—now—the twentieth century—and not to copy what the Greeks saw and felt in art over two thousand years ago. The Greek sculptors always followed a set, fixed form, and never showed any sentiment. The very early Greeks and the Primitives only worked from the basis of emotion, but this grew cold, and disappeared in the following centuries. It makes no difference what are the proportions, if there is feeling. And if the sculptor who modeled this makes me think only of a dwarf, then he has failed to express the beauty which should overpower all lack of proportion, and this is only done through or by means of his emotions.
“My favorite masters are Goya, Durer, Rembrandt, Corot, and Manet. I often go to the Louvre, and there I study Chardin’s work more than any other; I go there to study his technic.”
His palette was a large one, and so chaotic and disorderly were the vivid colors on it that a close resemblance could be traced to some of his pictures.
“I never mix much; I use small brushes and never more than twelve colors. I use black to cool the blue.
“I seldom paint portraits; and, if I do, only in a decorative manner. I can see them in no other way.”