The Daily Quote

“I’m well aware that in troubled periods, the artist feels himself wavering and is tempted to abandon his art and place himself at the service of a specific, immediate ideal. It’s the discrepancy between the frivilousness of his task and the seriousness of history’s events that haunts the artist; he wishes he were a philosopher. When these kinds of thoughts come to my mind, I think of Matisse. He lived through three wars and served in none; he was too young in 1870, too old in 1914, a patriarch in 1940. He died in 1954, between the war in Indochina and the Algerian war, and had completed his life’s work: fish, women, flowers, landscapes, with sections of windows. The wars were the frivolous events in his life, the thousands of paintings he left were the serious events. Art for art’s sake? No. Art for beauty’s sake, art for the sake of others. Matisse began by comforting himself, then he comforted others.”
Francois Truffaut