Quotes about art
page 15

Lorin Morgan-Richards photo
Gideon Mantell photo
John Constable photo

“My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular?”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Mr. C.R. Leslie 22 June 1832
1830s

Adam Gopnik photo
John Miles Foley photo
Mani Madhava Chakyar photo
Mani Madhava Chakyar photo

““the greatest eye-wizard of the world!”
- Stella Kramrisch - Curator of Indian Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA, c1980”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Source: Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya, p. 299, Das Bhargavinilayam, Mani Madhaveeyam http://www.kerala.gov.in/dept_culture/books.htm(biography of Mani Madhava Chakyar), Department of Cultural Affairs, Government of Kerala, 1999, ISBN 81-86365-78-8

Piet Mondrian photo

“The artist make things move, and is moved. He is policeman, motor car, everything at once. He who makes things move also creates rest. That which aesthetically is brought to rest is art.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In 'The Grand Boulevards' (of Paris), Piet Mondriaan, in 'De Groene Amsterdammer', 27 March 1920 pp. 4-5
1920's

Henry Moore photo
George Holmes Howison photo

“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.182

Helen Rowland photo

“Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/975693.Helen_Rowland
Other

H.L. Mencken photo
John Constable photo
Marino Marini photo
Gavrila Derzhavin photo

“Thou art! directing, guiding all, Thou art!
Direct my understanding then to Thee;
Control my spirit, guide my wandering heart:
Though but an atom midst immensity.”

Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) Russian poet

Poemː God
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 283.

Jerry Coyne photo
Marc Chagall photo
Vytautas Juozapaitis photo
André Malraux photo

“Art is a revolt against fate.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

Part IV, Chapter VII
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

“I was attracted to video art because it allowed me to combine a strong sense of content with formal innovation. The field was wide open and allowed for a great deal of experimentation for creating new forms.”

Beryl Korot (1945) American artist

Source: Meeker, Carlene. " Beryl Korot http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/korot-beryl." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on July 9, 2015)

Eric R. Kandel photo

“The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna…”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)
Variant: The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna...

Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Łukasz Pawlikowski photo

“Art does not ask about the age, just expects a lot.”

Łukasz Pawlikowski (1997) Polish cellist

Sztuka nie pyta o wiek, tylko oczekuje wiele.
A little cellist from Krakow conquers the world, warszawa.naszemiasto.pl, 2008-04-02, Polish http://warszawa.naszemiasto.pl/archiwum/1664386,maly-wiolonczelista-z-krakowa-podbija-swiat,id,t.html,

Carl Sandburg photo
Pete Seeger photo

“In the largest sense, every work of art is protest. … A lullaby is a propaganda song and any three-year-old knows it. … A hymn is a controversial song — sing one in the wrong church: you'll find out. …”

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer

Pop Chronicles, Show 33 - Revolt of the Fat Angel: American musicians respond to the British invaders. Part 1 http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19792/m1/, interview recorded 2.14.1968 http://web.archive.org/web/20110615153027/http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/o-s.

Robert Herrick photo
Paul Theroux photo

“Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Hockney’s Alphabet, D is for Death, ed. Stephen Spender (1991)
Book published to raise money for AIDS victims.

Henry James photo

“The new Christian ideal of life did not at first alter the outward forms of art, but did alter its social function.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages

Arsène Wenger photo

“When I first came to Arsenal, I realised the back four were all university graduates in the art of defending. As for Tony Adams, I consider him to be a doctor of defence. He is simply outstanding.”

Arsène Wenger (1949) French footballer and manager

On Arsenal's famous back four, (1997)
Quotations from the Public Comments of Arsene Wenger: Manager, Arsenal Football Club (2005)

Margaret Atwood photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
Dana Gioia photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo

“The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 349.

Thomas Jackson photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Karel Appel photo
Phillip Guston photo

“He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness… He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Vale, Peter Cook' ( The Pembroke College, Cambridge, Society Annuel Gazette http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/odds+ends/petercook.html, September 1995)
Essays and reviews

Henry Moore photo
Vanna Bonta photo
Connie Willis photo

““How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”
“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.
“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”
“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”
“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”
“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”
“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.
“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”
“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.””

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 22 (p. 374)

Elfriede Jelinek photo
Charles Churchill (satirist) photo

“Apt alliteration's artful aid.”

Charles Churchill (satirist) (1731–1764) British poet

The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots Pastoral (1763), line 86

Kazimir Malevich photo

“.. [that] the overturning of the old world of arts will be etched across your 'palms”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

recto
admonition from the cover of Malevich's 'novykh sistemakh v iskusstve' (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); the cover is reproduced in Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, Larissa A. Zhadova, (trans. Alexander Lieven); London: Thames and Hudson, 1982
the notice on the verso reads: 'Work and edition by the workshop [artef] of artistic labor at the Vitebsk Svomas'
1910 - 1920

Hakim Bey photo

“Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication…is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.”

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

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
1950s

Charles Krauthammer photo
Alberto Giacometti photo

“In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Swiss sculptor and painter (1901-1966)

Alberto Giacometti (1945), as cited in: Joel Shatzky, ‎Michael Taub (1999), Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets. p. 302

John Dryden photo

“Thespis, the first professor of our art,
At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Prologue to Lee's Sophonisba.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Bill Evans photo
Eric R. Kandel photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Ernest Flagg photo

“A master in art need not go into the highways and byways for affects; he knows the straight course and follows it.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

William Faulkner photo
Mani Madhava Chakyar photo

““Eyes, what an eloquent pair he has! He is able to express with them even the slightest difference in the mood”
- L. S Rajagopalan (noted art critic), 1990”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Source: Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya, L.S Rajagopalan, Mani Madhava Chakyar- A Titan of A Thespian, Sruti- India's premier Music and Dance magazine, August 1990 issue (71), p. 17.

Walter Scott photo

“Art thou a friend to Roderick?”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto IV, stanza 30.
The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Albert Camus photo

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation

Aubrey Beardsley photo
Phillip Guston photo
Gerhard Richter photo
William Irwin Thompson photo
Sufjan Stevens photo

“Art is… a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

Secular, Sacred, or Both?, 2005-07-11, 2006-08-25, Bowman, Kate http://www.christianitytoday.com/music/commentaries/secularsacreddivide.html,

Jozef Israëls photo

“Actually I don't have any painting at home…. they take away everything from me, almost before it's finished… That Jewish scribe there, is sold to [Dutch art-seller] Buffa, and it isn't finished at all yet. And this 'Kolen lossen' is also sold… Then I have here 'The Mowers' - just set up… And that drawing here, will be a good piece too!.. That will become a large painting: a 'Jewish Wedding' - at the moment the groom puts the ring on the finger of his bride…. you can't see very much yet, do you? (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

version in Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls, in het Nederlands): Ik heb eigenlijk niets in huis.. ..ze halen de boel bij me weg, haast nog voordat het àf is.. .Die Joodsche Wetschrijver daar, is aan Buffa verkocht, en hij is nog lang niet hàlf af. En die 'Kolen lossen' is ook al weg.. Dàn heb ik daar ' De Maaiers', pas opgezet.. .En die teekening hier, die zal óók wel goed worden!.. .Dat wordt een groot schilderij: een 'Joodsche Bruiloft', - het moment dat de bruidegom zijn bruid den ring aan den vinger steekt.. .Je ziet [er] nog niet veel àn, vin-je wel?.
Quote of Israëls, 1901-02; as cited by N.H. Wolf, in 'Bij onze Nederlandsche kunstenaars. IV. - Jozef Israëls, Grootmeester der Nederlandsche Schilders', in Wereldkroniek, 8 Feb. 1902
Wolf was visiting Israëls in his studio in The Hague as preparation for his coming article on the old artist
Quotes of Jozef Israels, after 1900

Paul Gauguin photo

“Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 5 & 22: Gauguin is advising a fellow painter, 1885

Yves Klein photo
Isa Genzken photo

“For me personally, the greatest art to date has been created in New York and the most uptight and conventional art in Berlin. Obviously, I am an exception to this rule!”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

living and working in Berlin
after 2010, Isa Genzken, the artist who doesn't do interviews' (2014)

Thomas Jefferson photo

“The art and mystery of banks… is established on the principle that 'private debts are a public blessing.' That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a give proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for.”

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

ME 13:420
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

Al Alvarez photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Edward Young photo

“When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap, as quoted in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (1963) by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 25, and in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1991) by Ray Monk, p. 244

Nicholas Serota photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
Joseph Beuys photo

“Thou water turn'st to wine, fair friend of life;
Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of Thy reign,
Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife,
And so turns wine to water back again.”

Richard Crashaw (1612–1649) British writer

Steps to the Temple, To Our Lord upon the Water Made Wine; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 516.

Naum Gabo photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Niccolo Machiavelli photo

“The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up.”

Howard Raiffa (1924–2016) American academic

Part III, Chapter 10, AMPO Versus City, p. 142.
The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982)

Joseph Beuys photo

“He [ Marcel Duchamp ] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, by Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 206
Quotes after 1984, posthumous published

Paul Volcker photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“All my work is in a way founded on Japanese art... Japanese art, in decadence in its own country, takes root again among the French impressionist artists.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Summer 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 510) p. 32
1880s, 1888

Paul Klee photo
Pope John Paul II photo

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to artists, 4 April 1999
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html

Vitruvius photo
Roy Lichtenstein photo