„In French there is an old expression, ‘la patte’, meaning the artist’s touch, his personal style, his ‘paw’. I wanted to get away from la patte and all that retinal painting.“

— Marcel Duchamp

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„It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color — not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.“
— Henri Matisse
„My brother [the sculptor artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon had a kitchen in his little house in Puteaux, and he had the idea of decorating it with pictures by his buddies. He asked Gleizes, Metzinger, La Fresnaye, and I think Leger [all Cubist painters, then] to do some little paintings of the same size, like a sort of frieze. He asked me too, and I painted a coffee grinder which I made to explode.“
— Marcel Duchamp
„The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer — meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.“
— Rollo May