Quotes about museum (257 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“In the second half of the 18th century, first residences-museums were created in Poland. Old palaces were changed to adapt them for exhibitions purposes, or new buildings were erected with separate museum annexes. First such museums in Poland was established in 1802 by Stanisław Kostka Potocki at Wilanów. The museums at Nieborów, Nieśwież, Puławy, Rogalin, Gołuchów and Kórnik followed. At first these museums were established as a response to fashion, later national and patriotic issues became prevailing reasons.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

Residences-museums: Heritage of the european culture in Poland, "Aura" 7, 1991-07, p. 14-16. http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-81720189-fe01-4686-befa-5b1649bfb0d9?q=1248075a-cd0e-4666-81f5-dc2af54d3ff7$4&qt=IN_PAGE

Fashion , Change

“Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Life , Perfection

“Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor

"Shrine or Factory?" (1918); translation from Mikhail Anikst et al. (eds.) Soviet Commercial Design of the Twenties (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987) p. 15

Art , Home , Dead

“Give me a museum and I'll fill it.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

“Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Source: Practical Ethics

People , Beauty , Art , Way

“MUSEUM
They came, they looked, they walked
their eyes wide open
they didn’t see
because their minds were closed

Their eyes wide open
they didn’t know they couldn’t see
because their minds were closed;
so they looked, and left.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

“In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Love , Sense , Time , Heart

“In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Boy

“As far as I can tell, the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on day trips with the art department.”

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

Existencilism (2002)

Art

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Time

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Love , Feeling , Dance , Painting

“The great historian John Hope Franklin, who helped to get this museum started, once said, “Good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.” He understood the best history doesn’t just sit behind a glass case; it helps us to understand what’s outside the case. The best history helps us recognize the mistakes that we’ve made and the dark corners of the human spirit that we need to guard against. And, yes, a clear-eyed view of history can make us uncomfortable, and shake us out of familiar narratives. But it is precisely because of that discomfort that we learn and grow and harness our collective power to make this nation more perfect.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by the President at the Dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/24/remarks-president-dedication-national-museum-african-american-history (24 September 2016)
2016

Hope , History , Understanding , Learning

“Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"In a Post-Culture".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Books , World , Music , Winter

“One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.”

Muhammad Yunus (1940) Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

"Interview with Prof. Muhammad Yunus" Australian Broadcasting Corporation (25 March 1997) http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/stories/s400630.htm

“I like to work alone, because it irritates me if people say something stupid — I just can’t stand it… I have a Polish guy who comes in and cleans the studio, but pretty much no one else. [talking over a cappuccino, at the Museum of Modern Art New York, during her show there in 2013]”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

after 2010, No, It Isn't Supposed to Be Easy' (2013)

People , Stupidity , Art , Guy

“There are the most amusing things everywhere [in The Netherlands]. Houses of every colour, hundreds of windmills and enchanting boats, extremely friendly Dutchmen who almost all speak French…. I have not had time to visit the museums, I wish to work first of all and I'll treat myself to that later.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in a letter to Camille Pissarro, 17 June 1871; first part cited in: Van Gogh Museum Journal 2001 http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_van012200101_01/_van012200101_01_0012.php Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 2001. p. 140; second part cited in: Ann Dumas, ‎Denver Art Museum, ‎High Museum of Art (2007), Inspiring Impressionism: : the Impressionists and the art of the past. p. 181
1870 - 1890

Time , Housing

“Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:

Freundschaftsbezeigungen.
Dilletantenaufdringlichkeiten.
Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.
These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper any time and see them marching majestically across the page,—and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. "Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:

Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
Alterthumswissenschaften.
Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.
Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.
Wiederherstellungsbestrebungen.
Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.
Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape,—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help; but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere,—so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.”

Mark Twain book A Tramp Abroad

A Tramp Abroad (1880)

Music , Way , Imagination , Mountain

“The butt is not a magical place that only gay people can visit, like a leather bar or the Liberace Museum.”

Dan Savage (1964) American sex advice columnist and gay rights campaigner

Butting In http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=11125, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 27 June 2002

People

“When Miss Nochlin says: 'If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.' Well, I think the status quo in the arts is fine as it is - in this country [America] at least, women have exactly the same chance that men do. There are the same schools, museums, galleries, books, art stores. There are no obstacles in the way of a woman becoming a painter or sculptor other than the usual obstacles that any artist has to face.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n. p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Women , Men , Books , School

“How I miss you here [his friend in Paris - Manet visited Madrid and the famous museums there], and how delighted you would have been to see Velázquez, who in himself alone is worth the journey... He is the painter of painters. He did not astonish me, but delighted me.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Quote from Manet's letter to Fantin-Latour, Madrid 1865, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, (translation Daphne Woodward), p. 118
1850 - 1875

“Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Laura, Scene Two
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Disappointment , Suffering

“When he was not busy doing math, he reads fat books covered with rough leather, on the pages of which can be seen very old, perfectly round holes dug out by medieval worms. Or else he passes through a museum while devoting himself to unbelievably profound notions about Van Gogh's paintings or Greek amphorae.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

From At home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil, p. 31 https://books.google.com/books?id=OdeDlT9-GBUC&pg=PA31
Quote About

Books , Business , Reading , Painting

“We are not on earth as museum keepers, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life and to prepare a glorious future. The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope!”

Pope John XXIII (1881–1963) 261st Pope of the Catholic Church

Journal entry on the day Pope Pius XII died (9 October 1958); published in Journal of a Soul (1965)
Context: One of my favorite phrases that brings me great comfort: We are not on earth as museum keepers, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life and to prepare a glorious future. The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope!

Life , Future , Dead

“There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 8: 'Hunger Was Good Discipline'
Context: You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens... There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.

Beauty , Painting

“The old palaces of the Tsars and the nobility have now become museums and rest-houses and sanatoria for the people… I suppose the old palaces now serve the purpose of children and young people. Children and the young are the favoured persons in Soviet land today, and they get the best of everything, even though others might suffer lack. It is for them that the present generation labours, for it is they who will inherit the socialised and scientific State, if that finally comes into existence in their time.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Time , Housing , Personality , Children

“Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.”

Haruki Murakami book Pinball, 1973

Source: Pinball, 1973

Feeling

“Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Life , World , Smile , Art

“This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

History , Problem , Parting

“I’d been to the British museum before. In fact I’ve been in more museums than I like to admit—it makes me sound like a total geek.
[That’s Sadie in the background, yelling I am a total geek. Thanks, Sis. ]”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

“Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums; others we take for walks.”

Roger A. Caras (1928–2001) American photographer

“And exactly how old are you MacRieve?"
"Twelve hundreds, give or take."
"Great Hekate, you're a relic. Don't you have a museum exhibit to be in somewhere?”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dark Needs at Night's Edge

“I parked in front of the Field Museum under a NO PARKING sign. There were a couple of actual spots I could have used, but the drive was even closer. Besides, I found it aesthetically satisfying to defy municipal code.”

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

“A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Eternity Code

“We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Life , Idea , Change

“You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: An Object of Beauty

Children , Art , Thinking

“I guess it started in London, the night our dad blew up the British museum.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Night

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Feeling , Exercises , Thinking

“We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.”

Ralph Ellison book Shadow and Act

Source: Shadow and Act

Sun

“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”

Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) French writer

World , Painting

“Dublin City was quiet when they reached the Waxwork Museum, as if it was holding its breath.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

“When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Mood

“One more instance I will give of his interest and his knowledge. We were passing under a fir tree when we heard a small song in the tree above us. We stopped and I said that was the song of a golden-crested wren. He listened very attentively while the bird repeated its little song, as its habit is. Then he said, "I think that is exactly the same song as that of a bird that we have in America"; and that was the only English song that he recognized as being the same as any bird song in America. Some time afterwards I met a bird expert in the Natural History Museum in London and told him this incident, and he confirmed what Colonel Roosevelt had said, that the song of this bird would be about the only song that the two countries had in common. I think that a very remarkable instance of minute and accurate knowledge on the part of Colonel Roosevelt. It was the business of the bird expert in London to know about birds. Colonel Roosevelt's knowledge was a mere incident acquired, not as part of the work of his life, but entirely outside it.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

Life , History , Business , Nature

“But the Japanese paper was what I loved, and now, so many years later, when I see some exquisitely laid piece of calligraphy by a student of Ogata Korin in a museum, I think first not of the spiritualized handwork of Momoyama Japan, but of those long evenings in the family garage with Dad, smoothing and stretching the refined wing coverings of those planes.”

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

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Love , Family , Thinking

“I went to a museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Steven Wright Special (1985)

“In 1987 a Civil Service inquiry decided that the pay of the Director of the Tate Gallery should match that of the Director of the much larger Victoria & Albert Museum and of the National Gallery, where the pictures were regarded as being much more important, because, and here I quote, "the Director of the Tate has to deal with the very difficult problem of modern art."”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Art , Quotes , Problem

“[T]he rooms which had been placed at my disposal by the American Museum of New York became temporarily unavailable. …[W]e determined to rent a house in New Haven, Conn., and thither the laboratory was removed in November, 1882. …[T]he city offered excellent library and other facilities for scientific work, such as can be met only in the immediate vicinity of a large university [Yale College]. …The work in New Haven was not satisfactorily completed. In July, 1883, with the appointment of Prof. F. W. Clarke as chief chemist of the Geological Survey, our laboratory was officially connected with the chemical laboratory. Conformably with the further decision of the Director, by which the divers laboratories of the Geological Survey were united in one central laboratory in Washington, it was again necessary to change our basis of operations, this time… from New Haven to Washington. In the quarters assigned to us in the U. S. National Museum, temperature work on so large a scale… appeared impracticable, and it was therefore abandoned. …In place of the dangerous and cumbersome apparatus of the former laboratory, the endeavor is made to reduce all apparatus to the smallest dimensions compatible with reasonable accuracy of measurement.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"On the Thermo-Electric Measurement of High Temperatures" (April 8, 1889)

Decision , Universe , Appearance , Change

““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

World , Art

“Tomorrow, Sunday, at 4 o'clock, visit from Picasso. As I'm expecting to see him tomorrow, my mind is at work. I'm doing this propaganda show [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 1945] with him. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other. It's as if I were going to cohabit with an epileptic.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Quote of Matisse in his notebook, c. April 1945; as cited in 'Matisse & Picasso', Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 6
1940s

Imagination

“I feel responsible, because so many people are leaning against me. Of course I can not take that pole away from them, they will fall over. I can see that those people need it! An ongoing struggle, an ordeal - because, if I say something I have to make it happen. In this way, painting is a religious matter. My paintings create a consciousness that offers comfort... It must appear in the light. Somebody of eighty years old who never ever would think about visiting a museum. Recognition!”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Ik voel me verantwoordelijk, omdat er zoveel mensen tegen me aan leunen. Ik kan die paal natuurlijk niet voor ze wegzagen, dan vallen ze om. Ik zie toch dat die mensen er behoefte aan hebben! Een voortdurend gevecht, een beproeving, want als ik iets zeg moet ik het waarmaken. Schilderen is op deze manier een religieuze aangelegenheid. Door mijn werken ontstaat een bewustzijn, dat troost biedt.. .Het moet voor 't licht komen. Zo'n mens van tachtig dat er nog nooit ook maar één seconde aan heeft gedacht een museum binnen te wandelen. Herkenning.
Mens & Gevoelens: Jopie Huisman', 1993

People , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“I have never really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the chamber work or novels to the short story.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Art , Music , Home

“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

Art , Drawing

“I beg you, if I die, don't let me go piecemeal into the public collections, my work would not be fairly judged. I want to get in complete or not at all... Please, please, promise me one thing, never let my things go into a museum piecemeal.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

remark to his friend Antonin Proust; as cited in: Manet by Himself, p. 304; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 241
Antonin Proust had recently become minister of Arts in France
1876 - 1883

“.. No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29
1920's, My life (1922)

Money , Feeling , Sense , Painting

“Creation of absolutely the first rank — in philosophy, in music, in much of literature, in mathematics — continues to occur outside the American milieu. It is at once taken up and intelligently exploited, but the "motion of the spirit" has taken place elsewhere, amid the enervation of Europe, in the oppressive climate of Russia. There is, in a good deal of American intellectual, artistic production (recent paining may be a challenging exception) a characteristic near-greatness, a strength just below the best. Could it be that the United States is destined to be the "museum culture?"”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Pain , Music , Intelligence , Literature

“You see, when we're talking about origins, we're talking about the past, we're talking about our origins. We weren't there, you can't observe that, whether it's molecules-to-man evolution or the creation account. When you're talking about the past, we like to call that origins or historical science: knowledge concerning the past. Here at the Creation Museum, we make no apology about the fact that our origins or historical science is actually based upon the biblical account of origins. When you research science text books being used in public schools, what we found is this: by and large the origins or historical science is based on man's ideas about the past, for instance the ideas of Darwin.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

Books , School , Idea , Knowledge

“Soon there will be nothing left except the lying dreams of history, the miserable wreckage of our museums and picture-galleries, and the carefully guarded interiors of our aesthetic drawing-rooms, unreal and foolish, fitting witnesses of the life of corruption that goes on there, so pinched and meagre and cowardly, with its concealment and ignoring, rather than restraint of, natural longings; which does not forbid the greedy indulgence in them if it can but be decently hidden.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Signs of Change (1888), The Aims of Art

Life , Dreams , History , Lying

“I want to give something [a painting to museum The Luxembourg in Paris, c. 1910] I can't be sure of doing again. I could do ten more nudes like that one [a large nude painting, suggested by Georges Riviere], whenever I liked... This one turned out well. I don't think I'd be able to do that again.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

a remark to George Riviere, (c. 1910); as quoted in Renoir – his life and work, Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates /Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 230
after 1900

Thinking , Painting

“I was like a gravedigger while I painted these corpses [of the dead Baader-Meinhoff members]. It was just work. If I felt one of them looked too theatrical, I painted over it… I was afraid more of the reaction on the left than the right. It was still very dangerous to deal with this subject in Germany. There was fear that the museum where I showed them might be bombed. All my friends were on the left, but I was not. They said: 'Someone with the right mentality could do this, but not Richter - he is too bourgeois. He steals Baader-Meinhof away from us.' To me, they were part of the problem. I was standing outside watching how people, on both sides [left / right], ignored the truth because of their beliefs, beliefs that made them crazy. That was the point of the pictures.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

In 1988, Richter painted a series of 15 works titled 'October 18, 1977.' It shocked Germany, especially left. The series was based on photographs of the anti-capitalist Baader-Meinhof group, which called itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) and were in prison and died in 1977.
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

People , Truth , Fear , Problem

“I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist... I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Source: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, pp. 7-8

Love , Children , Pleasure , World

“I studied a good deal in the museum at Naples; the Pompeian paintings are extremely interesting from every aspect. So I am staying in the sun – not to paint portraits but while I am warming myself and looking hard at things I hope I will have acquired some of the grandeur and simplicity of the old masters. Raphael didn't work out-of-doors, but he studied the sunlight all the same – his frescoes are full of it. So, by looking around outside, I have finished by seeing only the broad harmonies, and am no longer preoccupied with the little details, which only extinguish the sunlight, instead of increasing its brilliance. I hope therefore, when I get back to Paris, to produce something which will be the outcome of all these general studies, and to give you the benefit of them”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

in a letter written during his three-weeks-stay, working with Paul Cezanne at l'Estaque, near Marseille
Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 169 in a letter to madame Charpentier, l'Estaque, January 1882

Hope , Study , Sun , Painting

“Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

On Israel's alleged "clandestine activities". http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/249irrsq.asp
2000s

People , Feeling , Idea , Country

“"Don't you even feel how marvellous it is to have talked to one of the Little People?" I said.
"No, not as the main thing," Grundo grunted. "If you think like that, then you're treating him like something in a museum, not as a person."”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Magids Series, The Merlin Conspiracy (2003), p. 150.

People , Feeling , Thinking , Personality

“You know why I go to museums on my day off? It restores my sense of Western Civilization, of History—it gives me a reason to go on… But at the same time I think, "Is this gonna be here 50 years from now, with the Muslims taking over the world? What will they do if they become a majority in America? What, burn the museums, throw the paintings into a bonfire?"”

Michael Savage book The Savage Nation

I mean, I really ask myself how this can go on.
The Savage Nation
The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015-01-23
Radio
2015

World , History , Thinking , Sense

“I think of the classical world as a cancer patient or an AIDS patient. You know you have a limited life span. The question you now might want to ask is what would be the most important things to do now with your remaining years. I would like to think that that type of prioritizing could happen with museums, symphony orchestras, opera companies. Things really are urgent right now, and what we're doing somehow has to matter, has to make a contribution.”

Peter Sellars (1957) American theatre director

Source: Mark Swed, "For L.A., History's Knocking", Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1996

Life , World , Question , Thinking

“The freedom is far more important than the money. The endgame is to be an extremely famous artist in lots of museums all around the world so lots of people can see my work for free. I know what I'm making, I know it's good. I will reserve the right to paint the [bombed] bus or anything that is shocking in life. If someone wants to come and shoot me because they find that offensive, they can. As an artist, if you can't take that freedom, you're a wanker.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Smith, David. "Art? It's like the sex trade" http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/apr/23/art3, The Observer, (2006-04-23)
On artistic freedom.

Life , Money , People , World

“He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.”

Walker Percy book The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

Books , Reading

“Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Evelyn Waugh: Club and Country", p. 95
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Education , Sadness , School , Game

“The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 283, "The Old Age of Modernism"

World , Art , Parting

“It was not the inexperienced art public that became American Scenists. It was the artists themselves, a highly sophisticated group, thoroughly familiar with the art work and the art traditions of the world, who had flocked to Paris to participate in the great cultural center, who were very conscious of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists revolutions, who fell for this propaganda [to strive for a pure national American art]. It is upon them that responsibility falls. Their support of this reactionary philistinism is an inexcusable betrayal... It is time for the artists to wake up and re-examine their aesthetic foundations; to rid themselves of the millstone that has made art in America an expensive picture postcard-factory... It is time that artists refused isolationist money, repudiated the art dealers, the favor of the museum directors. It is time artists forgot about success..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Quote of 1942; in Barnett Newman', by Thomas B. Hess, museum of Modern art, New York 1971; as cited in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 124-125
1940 - 1950

Money , World , Art , Support

“Classical music has struggled to keep up. Unlike any other art form, it keeps on looking backwards all the time. It used to have a real museum culture. Then it went: "Oh my God, what are we going to do? Call for Nigel Kennedy. Quick!" Classical musicians have got to change or die,' she asserts strongly, 'but they just don't know how to. Audiences for classical music have dropped. The old blue rinse audience is dying out, and young people aren't coming in.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

On Classical Music

God , People , Art , Music

“Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

On Boston, The New York Times (27 November 1955)

People

“To show this later progress in my own work I refer to my [paintings] 'Organ-playing monk', in 1850, my 'Lord's Supper in the Geestes-kerk (church) in Utrecht' in 1852, and my 'Bakenesse-kerk (church) in Haarlem', painted a dozen years later. All three can be found in the museum Fodor and can thus be compared to each other. The preference will undoubtedly be given to the latter, which for its strength and unity is counted among the masterpieces of this [Fodor] collection.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands): Om dien lateren vooruitgang in mijn eigen werk te toonen, verwijs ik naar mijn [werken] 'Orgelspelende monnik' in 1850, mijn 'Avondmaalsviering in de Geesteskerk te Utrecht' in 1852 en mijn 'Bakenessekerk te Haarlem', een tiental jaren later geschilderd - alle drie in het museum Fodor te vinden en dus onderling te vergelijken. De voorkeur zal ongetwijfeld aan het laatste worden toegekend, dat om zijn kracht en éénheid tot de meesterstukjes dezer verzameling gerekend wordt.
Quote of Bosboom, in his autobiography, c. 1890; as cited in De Hollandsche Schilderkunst in de Negentiende Eeuw, G. H. Marius; https://ia800204.us.archive.org/31/items/dehollandschesch00mariuoft/dehollandschesch00mariuoft.pdf Martinus Nijhoff, s-’Gravenhage / The Hague, tweede druk, 1920, pp. 108-09 (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1890's

Painting

“One room after another in the British museum took my enthusiasm. The Royal College of Art meant nothing in comparison. Every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday I would go to the British Museum. But not till after three months did things begin to settle into any pattern of reality for me. Till then everything was wonderful – a new world at every turn. That is the value of the British Museum: you have everything behind you; you are free to try to find out your own way and, after a while, to find what appeals to you most. And after the first excitement it was the art of ancient Mexico that spoke to me most – except perhaps Romanesque, or early Norman. And I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as everything I could do.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

in 'Partisan Review', New York, March-April 1947
1940 - 1955

World , Art , Way , Reality

“This museum is like a ghost train—at every stage you find a surprise. Intuition prepares you for enlightenment, not audio-visual lectures. There's less to read, more to fee.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck cited in: Priscilla Boniface, Peter Jon Fowler (1993) Heritage and Tourism: In the Global Village. p. 161: Starck is talking about the Groninger Museum.

Reading , Training

“Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually "natural" actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra's direction, she plays a tough "party" girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Ladies of Leisure," p. 403
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Way , Girl , Understanding , Nature

“LeDuff’s argument (in Shock Art #37) that an image, once floated on the international art-sea, is a fish that anyone may grab with impunity, and make it his own, would not persuade an oyster. Questions of primacy are not to be scumbled in this way, which, had he been writing from a European perspective, he would understand, and be ashamed. The brutality of the American rape of the world’s exhibition spaces and organs of art-information has distanciated his senses. The historical aspects have been adequately trodden by others, but there is one category yet to be entertained—that of the psychological. The fact that LeDuff is replicated in every museum, in every journal, that one cannot turn one’s gaze without bumping into this raw plethora, LeDuff, LeDuff, LeDuff (whereas poor Bruno, the true progenitor, is eating the tops of bunches of carrots)—what has this done to LeDuff himself? It has turned him into a dead artist, but the corpse yet bounces in its grave, calling attention toward itself in the most unseemly manner. But truth cannot be swallowed forever. When the real story of low optical stimulus is indited, Bruno will be rectified.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Letters to the Editore”, Guilty Pleasures (1974).

Truth , World , Art , Way

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475
1920s and later

Life , Sense , Painting

“from his postcard, October 1903 to de:Carl Moll; as quoted by Hans-Peter Wipplinger, director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which owns this postcard”

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) Swiss artist

Carl Moll was co-founder of the Vienna Secession which invited Hodler to participate in their exhibitions. Hans-Peter Wipplinger stated that it was then that Hodler received the recognition he had previously been denied in his own country, Switzerland

Quotes

“My dearest little Julie, I love you as I lie dying; I shall still love you when I am dead. I beg of you, do not cry; this parting was inevitable. I would have liked to be with you until you married – Work hard and be good as you have always been; you have never caused me a moment's sorrow in you little life [Julie is 16, then]. You have beauty, good fortune; use them well. I think the best thing would be to live with your cousins in the Rue de Villejust, but I do not wish to force you to do anything. Give a memento of me to you aunt Edma [Berthe's sister], and to your cousins too; and give Monet's [painting] 'Bateaux en reparation' to your cousin Gabriel. Tell M. Degas that if he found a museum he is to choose a Manet [of her Manet paintings]. A keepsake for Monet; one for Renoir, and one of my drawings for Bartolomé. Give something to the two concierges. Do not cry, I love you more than I can tell you.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

Quote of Berthe's last letter to daughter Julie, End of Feb. 1895; as cited in Berthe Morisot, Jean-Dominique Rey; translation in English, Flammarion, S.A. (ISBN: 978-2-08-020345-8), Paris, 2016, p. 217
1881 - 1895

Love , Life , Lie , Beauty

“It was around 1935 or 1936 that I first had the idea of compiling a history of art – not in the usual way, but considering only the fads that have succeeded one another down through the ages. For example, the infatuation in Roman times with broken pleats and heads turned in profile.... or during the epoch of Pérugin and Raphael, a certain blue that appears everywhere. I wanted to draw up an inventory of these vogues. To this end I visited museums, took notes in little notebooks, and made demonstrative sketches of paintings. For this purpose I preferred bad paintings, by which I mean those held to be mediocre by aesthetes, but in which these fads that interested me were clearly in evidence.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Source: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, pp. 17, 18

Age , Art , Way , History

“I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

Books

“The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight…and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 32 (p. 269)

Love , Books , Parting

“A museum that really wants to promote modern art might give the artist a guaranty, on certain conditions, so that he can get on with his life and his creations. Or do you believe that the museum is more interested in the artist's death, in order to see the price of his paintings go up?”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), p. 45 : in a letter (11 November 1940) to Käthe Steinitz, sent from the internment camp on Isle of Man, England.

Life , Death , Art , Painting

“This sprawling epic is as lively as a natural history museum diorama.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/03/07/10_000_bc/ of 10,000 BC (2008)

History , Nature

“Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Love , Study , Passion , Parting

“Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... w:Divisionism - [ Paul Signac initiated divisionism slightly earlier, together with Seurat ] - for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 92.
1910, Manifesto of Futurist Painters,' April 1910

Light , Painting , Night

“Putting a shovel in a gallery or museum signified “this shovel has become art.” And it actually was. The action itself is art, because the artist projects himself in choosing the shovel, and especially in placing it out of context. It is art in the sense that the imprint of a hand in a cave is art, the Mona Lisa is art, a happening is art, etc. It is a problem that touches on the ethics and function of the artist: he assumes the right to have this supra-human calling that allows him to say to others, “everything that I touch with my hand is transformed into art.” The artist imposes his anguish, his vision of the world, and himself on others. The artist emasculates the observer. Maybe he thinks that the latter deserves no better… The artist assumes the right to show you what you can see for yourself, what you could obviously see much more clearly without his intervention. I contest this right.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Source: Art is no longer justifiable or setting the record straight, 2000, p. 66-67

World , Art , Problem , Thinking

“In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch—phosphorus—flour—bottles of water and alcohol—and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that.”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

Letter dated 17th May 1867.
Observations

Alcohol , Water , Box

“When we go up to the shelves in the reading-room of the British Museum, how like it is to wasps flying up and down an apricot tree that is trained against a wall, or cattle coming down to drink at a pool!”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Mental and Physical Pabulum
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VI - Mind and Matter

Drink , Tree , Reading , Flying

“Conservation is not merely a thing to be enshrined in outdoor museums, but a way of living on land.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

" Game Cropping in Southern Wisconsin http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&id=AldoLeopold.ALReprints&entity=AldoLeopold.ALReprints.p0692&isize=XL", Our Native Landscape; Published by "The Friends of Our Native Landscape," October 1927.
1920s

Way

“And we saw the seed,
The minuscule Sequoia seed
In the museum by the tremendous slab
Of the tree. And imagined the seed
In soil and the growth quickened
So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing
Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green
Needles of a redwood until the tree
Stood in the room without soil—
How much of the earth's
Crust has lived
The seed’s violence!
The shock is metaphysical.”

George Oppen (1908–1984) American poet

"Return" st. 2, 1962; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Imagination , Tree

“I agree with Rosenberg’s text that says anything is art as soon as it is put in a museum. And that is why artists are such appalling things, since they are responsible for this state of affairs in art.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Source: Art is no longer justifiable or setting the record straight, 2000, p. 66

Art

“A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.”

John Cotton Dana (1856–1929) American librarian and museum director

New York Times, March 16, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/arts/17iht-rartmuseums.html

Art

“I had long wished for some opportunity of endeavouring to explain… the principles on which the instruments of an Observatory are constructed, (omitting all details, so far as they are merely subsidiary,) and the principles on which the observations made with these instruments are treated…
Such an opportunity appeared to present itself in the course of Lectures which I engaged to give to the Members of the Ipswich Museum and their friends.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Appearance

“Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.”

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

1970s, The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)

Art , Search

“A visit to a studio never fails to test my resources. It constantly reminds me of the condition in which most people first confront contemporary art. This is a state of "not knowing", of "not understanding", of being disorientated or challenged by the unfamiliar. One of my responsibilities as a curator is therefore to remember that a visitor encountering an unfamiliar work of art in the museum is likely to be as unprepared as I was in the studio. But I've come to realise that it's precisely when I am most challenged in my own reactions that the deepest insights emerge.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

People , Art , Understanding

“In 1935 I was appointed leading artist of the All-Soviet Agricultural Exhibition. I opposed the errors of the first leader, and resigned. Afterwards, while I was still in the sanatorium, I took over the design of the main building. The design of the main hall has been done according to my idea until now. From 1931 on, I was leading artist-architect of the 'Permanent Building Exhibition'. But as the years went by, my health deteriorating, I had less and less energy left for this type of commission, such as the realization of large-scale exhibitions. I still succeeded in designing the project for the museum-exhibition of the Ministry of 'Social Security'.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1926 - 1941, Autobiography of the artist' (1941)

Health , Error , Idea

“Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play-centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naive idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

On the occasion of the opening of Forty Years of Modern Art (February 1948)
Literary Quotes

Joy

“”Jewish Peril” exposed.
Historic “Fake.”
Details of the forgery.
More parallels.
We published yesterday an article from our Constantinople Correspondent, which showed that the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – one of the mysteries of politics since 1905 – were a clumsy forgery, the text being based on a book published in French in 1865. The book, without title page, was obtained by our correspondent from a Russian source, and we were able to identify it with a complete copy in the British Museum.
The disclosure, which naturally aroused the greatest interest among those familiar with Jewish questions, finally disposes of the “Protocols” as credible evidence of a Jewish plot against civilization.
We publish below a second article, which gives further close parallels between the language of the Protocols and that attributed to Machiavelli and Montesquieu in the volume dated from Geneva.
Plagiarism at Work.
(From our Constantinople Correspondent.)
While the Geneva Dialogue open with an exchange of compliments between Monsequieu and Machiavelli, which covers seven pages, the author of the Protocols plunges at once in medias res.
One can imagine him hastily turning over those first seven pages of the book which he has been ordered to paraphrase against time, and angrily ejaculating, “Nothing here.” But on page 8 of the Dialogues he finds what he wants.
Publisher: Good work Graves…we finally paid your émigré £ 300 for it…now if we can find Golovinski and get his confession…
Graves: He joined the Bolsheviks.
Golovinski became a party ‘’’activist’’’ and rose to be an adviser to Trotsky. But he ‘’’died’’’ last year!
Publisher: Well, that’s that!
Publisher: Oh but Graves, “The Times” is influential… after our expose we’ll probably hear no more of this fraud!
Graves: I’m not sure!
Anti-Bolsheviks, White Russians, published thousands of copies! Here’s a page from Nilus’ “The Great in the Small.”
Publisher: Astonishing…mystical symbols…eh?
The “Protocols” quickly began to circulate around the world.
A French edition this year…and in America Henry Ford, the auto magnate, has been serializing it in his paper, the “Dearborn independent”!
Publisher: When did it first appear in Europe?
Graves: The German edition…dated 1919, was the first!
This is an evil book…a fake designed to malign a whole group of people.
Publisher: I know, I know! …Ugly stuff, Graves.
Graves: Well, what are we to do about it?
Publisher: Your report exposed it as a foul fraud!
Publisher: Y’forget the power of the press, graves! “The Times” has tremendous worldwide influence.
This fraud will soon be well known everywhere…so, my boy, ‘’’what harm can the “protocols” possibly do now?”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 91-94

People , Books , World , Imagination