“If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”

— Claude Monet

Last update Feb. 19, 2026. History

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Claude Monet87

French impressionist painter 1840–1926

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“What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.”

Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) American pop artist

Quote of Lichtenstein in: Interview by G.R. Swenson (1963); as quoted in Painters on Painting, Eric Protter (1971) p. 263
1960's

“The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

On the cultural aspect of India.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

“I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at all. The painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there, became more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory. Until finally it became obvious that there had to be a better way.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 114

“I feel now if I think of it, it will come out in the painting. In other words, if I want to make the whole painting look like a bottle, like a lot of bottles - for instance maybe the end of the day, when everything is very light, but not in sunlight necessarily - and so if I have this image of this bottle and if I really think about it, it will come out in the painting. That doesn’t mean that people notice a bottle, but I know when I succeed in it – then the painting would have this.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 49.
1960's

“This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

In a letter to George Gamow, 1958, commenting on Werner Heisenberg's claim to a journalist that Pauli and Heisenberg have found a unified field theory, "but the technical details were missing"; as quoted in Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (1995) by Michio Kaku, p. 137
Context: This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. [A big drawing of a rectangle] Only technical details are missing.

“Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 45.
1960's

“There's a track called 'Why' that I really like. It's in the rock style again and I'm very satisfied with the lyrics. I wrote it after looking at a painting which had lots of things going on at the same time. Another song I really like is called 'I Still Love', because it's a little bit harder than the other ones.”

Basshunter (1984) Swedish singer, record producer and DJ

DigitalSpy interview with Alex Fletcher (7 September 2009) http://www.digitalspy.com/music/interviews/a175727/basshunter/ <br class="br">Bass Generation

“We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

“When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

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“If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”

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Claude Monet87

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