“The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century [1900] a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art... The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.”

— Willem de Kooning

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

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Willem de Kooning 38

Dutch painter 1904–1997

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“But one day, some painter used 'Abstraction' as a title for one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a very tricky title. And it wasn’t really a very good one. From then on the idea became something extra. Immediately it gave some people the idea that they could free art from itself. Until then, Art meant everything that was in it – not what you could take off it. There was only one thing you could take out of it sometime when you were in the right mood – that abstract and indefinable sensation, the aesthetic part – and still leave it were it was…”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Quote from De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

“After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. …In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

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“And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

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“I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.”

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Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 430

“It was the first time many of the bands had met and saw each other perform, so we were all really marveling at each other. It was just one good group of people after another. And different kinds of music — from Jimi Hendrix to Ravi Shankar, The Mamas and the Papas to The Who. They had a backstage area where there was food being served 24 hours a day, so everybody was wandering around meeting each other. It was just amazing.”

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“We [Richter and w:Blinky Palermo ] could really just speak about painting. The main thing was about the surface of color or the proportion of color. It was impossible for me to talk to Sigmar Polke about the opacity of color. With Palermo, yes. We supported each other, we comforted each other a little bit. We thought this really could not be true that everything was supposed to be over ['painting' as an expression of art, in the 1970's). Art had to be relevant [in the 1970's], and our art was not relevant.”

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Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In a letter to brother Theo, from Arles, c. 5 June 1888, in 'Van Gogh's Letters', letter 620 http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let620/letter.html, Van Goghmuseum
Vincent was busy, trying to convince a. o. Paul Gauguin to come to Arles, and to settle there
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“What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological 'For instance's. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn't apply to you, at least it was a documentary, it could apply to somebody you knew and it could clear up some questions you had about them.”

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“"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.”

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Alternating Current (1967)

“The development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

"Italian Report" (December 1955).

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