“The art of pictorial creation is so complicated — it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.”

—  Hans Hofmann

Quote of Hofmann in Hawthorne — the Painter: An Appreciation, (1952)
1950s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The art of pictorial creation is so complicated — it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combinatio…" by Hans Hofmann?
Hans Hofmann photo
Hans Hofmann 67
American artist 1880–1966

Related quotes

Arthur Miller photo

“The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

Paris Review (Summer 1966)
Context: If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

Wendell Berry photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 18

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Jorge Luis Borges photo

“The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"On Dubbing" ["Sobre el doblaje"]
Discussion (1932)
Context: The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.

David Brin photo
J.M.W. Turner photo

“To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote of Turner, c. 1810; as quoted in: Dennis Hugh Halloran (1970) The Classical Landscape Paintings of J.M.W. Turner. p. 75
1795 - 1820

Related topics