Kenneth Tynan: Quotes about art

Kenneth Tynan was English theatre critic and writer. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Kenneth Tynan: 80   quotes 2   likes

“Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source.”

Kenneth Tynan

Curtains (1961)
Context: Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

Art , Spring

“People have always needed art: but why have they needed it?”

Kenneth Tynan

Review of The Necessity of Art (1959) by Ernest Fischer
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
Context: People have always needed art: but why have they needed it? And what shaped the forms by which they satisfied their need? … In the arts form tends to be conservative, and content to be revolutionary; it is novelty of content that precedes, demands and imposes novelty of form.

People , Art

“The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.”

Kenneth Tynan

"Meditations on Basic Baroque," IV (1966), p. 432
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Art , Parting

“Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art.”

Kenneth Tynan

"Laurence Olivier" (1966), p. 208
Profiles (1990)

Art

“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”

Kenneth Tynan

From Dada Manifesto 1918 (23 March 1918) by Tristan Tzara
Misattributed

Art , Understanding , Strong

“One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful. The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself.”

Kenneth Tynan

"George Jean Nathan" (1953), p. 61
Profiles (1990)

Art , Business , Science , Personality