Quotes about oeuvre

A collection of quotes on the topic of oeuvre, life, time, first.

Quotes about oeuvre

Ossip Zadkine photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“They [great works of literature] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. Some of these images pertain to contemporary literature and survive in its most advanced creations. What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content—their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture? The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a “higher” order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction—the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 60-61

Friedrich Stadler photo

“Many innovations of current history and philosophy of science were, in fact, anticipated in Neurath’s oeuvre. The rediscovery of Neurath was therefore not merely a phenomenon of academic nostalgia, but itself constitutes research into the conditions and possibilities of changing a paradigm in the philosophy of science.”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

Friedrich Stadler (1996). "Otto Neurath—encyclopedia and utopia." In: E. Nemeth & F. Stadler (Eds.). Encyclopedia and utopia: The life and work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Boston: Kluwer. Stadler, 1996, p. 3

Burkard Schliessmann photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo

“Many pages of Prokofiev’s oeuvre continue the important tradition of Russian music based on fairy tale–inspired imagery.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev the pianist

Hans Arp photo

“To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Source: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 571 - Hans Arp's quote, made in 1962 in Galerie Denise René - this remark is also the last line in the art book Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs, Hans Arp, Gallimard, Paris 1966

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

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

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Anthony Burgess photo
Bram van Velde photo

“Painting, an oeuvre, is not such a big deal, it is so unimportant. But that’s precisely what makes it interesting.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Dany Laferrière photo
Henri Fantin-Latour photo

“The oeuvre of Frédéric Bazille is unclassifiable.”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote of Henri Fantin-Latour; as quoted by Aleth Jourdan, Jean-Patrice Marandel, Dianne W. Pitman, et al., in Frédéric Bazille: Prophet of Impressionism, exh. catalog; Brooklyn Museum, New York 1992, p. 15