
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Decay of Lying (1889)
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
'The Origin of Art'
Homage to the square' (1964)
As quoted in The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962) by Katharine Kuh, p. 118
1960s
“Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.”
“It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.”
Act 1
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 1.
Source: Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest PHilosophers (1926), reprinted in Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, ISBN 0-671-73916-6], Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VI: Psychology and the Nature of Art: "Artistic creation, says Aristotle, springs from the formative impulse and the craving for emotional expression. Essentially the form of art is an imitation of reality; it holds the mirror up to nature. There is in man a pleasure in imitation, apparently missing in lower animals. Yet the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is their reality.
"In Front of Your Nose" http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose, Tribune (22 March 1946)
Context: The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911