“Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth.”

—  Germaine Greer , The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work

Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 134)
Context: Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

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 "Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are fo…" by Germaine Greer?
Germaine Greer photo
Germaine Greer 73
Australian feminist author 1939

Related quotes

Florence Nightingale photo

“The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organisation do not permit them to act.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)
Context: The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organisation do not permit them to act. Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer. Peace be with the misanthropists! They have made a step in progress; the next will make them great philanthropists; they are divided but by a line.
The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ. But do we see one woman who looks like a female Christ? or even like "the messenger before" her "face", to go before her and prepare the hearts and minds for her?
To this will be answered that half the inmates of Bedlam begin in this way, by fancying that they are "the Christ."
People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.

Wassily Kandinsky photo

“Since the form is only an expression of the content and the content is different with different artists, it is then clear that there can be many different forms at the same time which are equally good. Necessity creates the form. Fish which live at great depths have no eyes. The elephant has a trunk. The chameleon changes its color, and so forth.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

1910 - 1915, On the Problem of Form (1912)

Audre Lorde photo

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Anton Chekhov photo

“Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act I http://books.google.com/books?id=RLrfgZwfeeUC&q=%22Great+Jove+angry+is+no+longer+Jove%22&pg=PA14#v=onepage
The Seagull (1896)

Robert Stawell Ball photo

“The intrinsic brightness of the Sun is fully 5,000 times as great as if the whole surface were formed of the molten steel just issuing from the Bessemer converter.”

Robert Stawell Ball (1840–1913) Irish astronomer

The Story of the Sun, London, 1906, p. 103

Abigail Adams photo

“But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)
Gerhard Richter photo

“I am primarily painting from photographs these days (from illustrated magazines but also from family photos), in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product (the “second-hand world” in which we live), I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization (deformation in form and color) contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject (generally stylization becomes the central problem which obscures everything else (object, subject), it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

In Richter's letters from Düsseldorf, 19 July 1963 - to two artist friends, Helmut and Erika Heinze
1960's

“They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.”

Edwin Muir (1887–1959) British poet, novelist and translator

The Animals (1983)

David Lloyd George photo

“A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On the peers of the House of Lords, in a speech in Newcastle (9 October 1909), quoted in printed in the Manchester Guardian http://books.google.com/books?id=pDzmAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1049 (11 October 1909)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (3 March 1919).
1910s

Related topics