“Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist's heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and on the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries fed the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. Today Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist's musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!”

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 8-9

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Auguste Rodin73

French sculptor 1840–1917

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“For I cannot think that God Almighty ever made them so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves.”

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“Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.”

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Context: Men are not accustomed to buy books unless they want them. If, on visiting the dwelling of a man of slender means, I find the reason why he has cheap carpets and very plain furniture to be that he may purchase books, he rises at once in my esteem. Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

“I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values.”

Luis Barragán (1902–1988) Mexican architect

Contemporary Architects, St. Martins Press.

“Architecture worth great attention. As we double our numbers every 20 years we must double our houses. Besides we build of such perishable materials that one half of our houses must be rebuilt in every space of 20 years. So that in that term, houses are to be built for three fourths of our inhabitants. It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Hints to Americans travelling in Europe, letter to John Rutledge, Jr. (June 19, 1788); in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (1956), vol. 13, p. 269
1780s

“Pollock.... left us [c. 1958] at the point where we must be preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street [New York].... Objects of every sorts are materials for the new art, paints, chairs, food, electric and neon-lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists.... All will become materials for this new concrete art.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In his essay 'The legacy of Jackson Pollock', published in 'ARTnews', Fall of 1958; as quoted by Christina Bryan Rosenberger, in 'Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin', Univ. of California Press, July 2016, p 121
this essay of 1958 became more or less an art-manifesto for the generation American artists after Abstract Expressionism

“All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished?”

Kengo Kuma (1954) Japanese architect (b.1954)

1954

“A man with taste is the same as a woman with taste. Man invents his home, woman - her dress. Being an artist means having an individual, distinct from all other people's perception and concept of every single thing. Being an artist does not mean possessing a faculty of combining lines and paints, being artful in this or that sort of art, but having a world inside oneself and individual forms to express it.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1895 - 1905
Source: Lettres à un Inconnu, (Notebook II, p. 8) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 106

“One is also reminded of how in art the tortoise so often overtakes the hare. Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. This is how they first become accessible to broad taste, which is lazy taste, and by the same token to the processes of publicity and consecration. As long as they were trammeled up in the urgency of getting things said they were too difficult, too "controversial."”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

On Hans Hofmann, in "Hofmann", in Georges (Fall 1961)
1960s

“The art of seeing Nature, or in other words, the art of using Models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 12; vol. 2, p. 104.
Discourses on Art

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