Quotes About Art

Wagner drives the nail into your head with swinging hammer blows.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..

The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

Beauty?... To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of the past he carries with him.

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work cannot always live in the present, it must not be considered art at all.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Art is a lie that tells the truth.