Quotes About Art

We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man.

It beats all the things that wealth can give and everything else in the world to say the things one believes, to put them into form, to pass them on to anyone who may care to take them up.

Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.

THE TECHNIQUE of a little individuality will be a little technique, however scrupulously elaborated it may be.

A public which likes to hear something worthwhile when you talk would like to understand something worthwhile when it sees pictures.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation. He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.

The object of painting a picture is-however unreasonable that may sound... The object which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. The picture is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of that state.

It is a creation of your own mind, not the model. The model is dependent on your idea of her. Your canvas should be a thing created under the influence of her.

Pictures tell the story of actual impulse in the artist—or the lack of it.

The effect of brilliancy is to be obtained principally from the oppositions of cool colors with warm colors, and the oppositions of grave colors with bright colors. If all the colors are bright there is no brightness.

A winning wave, deserving note,In the tempestuous petticoat,A careless shoestring, in whose tieI see a wild civility,Do more bewitch me than when artIs too precise in every part.

There is a danger in letting a camera make all its preprogrammed decisions for you:

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

There was practically nothing on Catalan painting, though the world's greatest surviving body of Romanesque frescoes, salvaged from decaying churches in the Ampurdan and the Pyrenees, was (and is) right there in the Museu d'Art de Catalunya up on Montjuïc.

This is what I see," becomes replaced by a question: "Is this what I see?" You share his hesitations about the positions of a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste-Victoire, and the trees in front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painting's subject.

Joan Maragall

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.

In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.