Guillaume Apollinaire Art Quotations

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.

The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.