The Quotable Artist

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CHAPTER ONE : On Art

When artists reflect on their origins, they are very honest about art and its affect on them. Reading their words, we discover real people with real nerves who were not born artists, but became artists the same way we did— by sketching, visiting museums, and by being attracted to the beautiful works of others. By seeing that other artists are real people, artists today are being encouraged to try something new, go further, explore a new medium.

IT IS THROUGH...ART

AND ART ONLY

THAT WE CAN SHIELD OURSELVES

FROM THE SORDID PERILS

OF ACTUAL EXISTENCE.

—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

THE COMING INTO the presence of a piece of art you truly love causes a tremendous revolution to occur in you. — Robert Henri (1865–1929)

On Art

In art only one thing

matters: that which

cannot be explained.

— Georges Braque (1882–1963)

WHEN I THINK of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.— Agnes Martin (1912– )

IN OUR fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes, the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know.The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour. . . . In a portrait, he must inscribe the character, and not the features, and must esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

THE FORCE OF Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and in its active contagiousness. Being a creation of Man it re-creates Man. Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy. It is not concerned with the meditation about what is and how it came to be.That is a task for knowledge. Knowledge is born of the desire to know,Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce. — Naum Gabo (1890–1977)

A GOOD LEGIBLE label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.— Mark Twain (1835–1910)

I HAVE READ that the ancients, when they produced a sound, used to modulate it, heightening and lowering its pitch without departing from the rules of harmony. So must the artist do in working at the nude.       — Antonio Canova (1757–1822)

IT IS fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity. — Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)

HARDENING OF THE categories causes art disease.— W. Eugene Smith (1918–1978)

FUTURISTS were supposed to blend art and life, to make art as important as science and politics.There has never been an art movement more grandiose and visionary, more wildly optimistic.— Harriet Janis (1899–1963) and Rudi Blesh (1899–1985)

ART for art’s sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.— George Sand (1804–1876)

ART IS MAGIC. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.— Hans Hofmann (1880 –1966)

LISTEN! There never was an artistic period.

There never was an Art-loving nation. — James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)

WHENEVER I HAVE seen art in its land of origin, I have been struck by its reliance on place. In America Japanese art looks withdrawn into itself, as if stiffened in what might poetically be thought of as self-defense;Australian Aboriginal art, unutterably powerful in Australia, loses meaning, can even be childish, decorative, when carted off that continent, losing force as visibly as a rainbow trout fades when cast onto the bank of a river.The European art I have seen in America seems anemic in comparison to what I am seeing here. . . . — Ann Truitt (1921– )

On Art

Art is when things

appear rounded.

—Maurice Denis (1870–1943)

ART is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life. —John Sloan (1871–1951)

AND SO THE arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental. Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his heart is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach to heaven.—Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)

THE ORGANIC laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these walls around art. Thus did I finally enter the realm of art, which like that of nature, science, political forms, etc., is a realm unto itself, is governed by its own laws proper to it alone, and which together with other realms ultimately forms the great realm which we can only dimly divine.

Today is the great day of one of the revelations of this world.The interrelationships of these individual realms were illumined as by a flash of lightning; they burst unexpected, frightening, and joyous out of the darkness. Never were they so strongly tied together and never so sharply divided.This lightning is the child of the darkening of the spiritual heaven which hung over us, black, suffocating, and dead. Here begins the epoch of the spiritual, the revelation of the spirit. . . . —Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)

THE REPRESENTATIVE element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions. — Ben Shahn (1898–1969), quoting from Clive Bell (1881–1964)

ANCIENT ART was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece, and the servant of Rome.—Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

SERIOUS art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses.Their work arose rather in defiance of their times.They are characteristic, fiery signs of a new era that increase daily everywhere. . . .What appears spectral today will be natural tomorrow.

Where are such signs and works? How do we recognize the genuine ones?

Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work’s conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.— Franz Marc (1880–1916)

ART ALMOST ALWAYS has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority, and its own enlightenment. — Ben Shahn (1898–1969)

ALL real works of art look as though they were done in joy.—Robert Henri (1865–1929)

I REGARD the mind itself as a tool. Most artists paint as though they had no minds. Their paintings look as though they were made from eye to hand with no intervention by the brain.That isn’t art. Art is the response of the living to life. It is therefore the record left behind by civilization.—John Sloan (1871–1951)

THE WHOLE audience of art is an audience of individuals. Each of them comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed. — Ben Shahn (1898–1969)

ART IS, after all, only a trace—like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.—Robert Henri (1865–1929)

[A WORK OF ART IS ] A corner of nature viewed through a temperament. — attributed to Émile Zola (1840 –1902)

BEAUTY IS THE only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

SURELY all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity. . . . —Ranier Maria Rilke (1876–1926)

On Art

ART IS THE PATH OF THE

CREATOR TO HIS WORK.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

WHAT WE cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. It is for that reason that I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same; for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness—to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world as our consciousness wants it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself. — Naum Gabo (1890–1977)

PROGRESS IN ART does not consist in expansion, but in an awareness of limits. — Georges Braque (1882–1963)

ART TENDS toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living—very good things for anyone to be interested in.—Robert Henri (1865–1929)

ART is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.— Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)

THE excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.— John Keats (1795–1821)

IT WAS Richepin who said somewhere:The love of art means loss of real love. . . .True, but on the other hand, real love makes you disgusted with art.— Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

EVERY ART, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things. — Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)

WHATEVER IS RECEIVED is received according to the nature of the recipient. — St.Thomas Aquinas (1225?–1274)

THE TRAVELERS into the East tell us that when the ignorant inhabitants of those countries are asked concerning the ruins of stately edifices . . . remaining among them, the melancholy moments of their former grandeur and long-lost science, they always answer that they were built by magicians.The untaught mind finds a vast gulf between its own powers and those works of complicated art which it is utterly unable to fathom; and it supposes that such a void can be passed only by superficial powers.

And as for artists themselves, it is by no means [in] their interest to undeceive such judges, however conscious they may be of the very nature by which their extraordinary powers were acquired; though our art, being intrinsically imitative, rejects this idea of inspiration, more perhaps than any other.—Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792)

TO BECOME truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.— Giorgio De Chirico (1888 –1978)

ART IS HARMONY.

Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of color, and of line, conditioned by the dominant key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.— Georges Seurat (1859 –1891)

ONE of the main causes of our artistic decline lies beyond doubt in the separation of art and science. Art is nothing but humanized science.— Gino Severini (1883–1966)

FOR ART AND Joy go together, with bold openness, and high head, and ready hand— fearing nought, and dreading no exposure.— James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)

ART among a religious race produces reliques; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.—Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

TASTE IS the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals.— Paul Cézanne (1839 –1906)

A TRUE work of art can stand many seeings, revealing anew at each seeing. — John Marin (1872–1953)

LIFE IS RAPID, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious and judgment partial. — Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

ART IS the desire of man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.— Amy Lowell (1874–1925)

I WOULD say the subtlety of my argument would be that if the aspirations of revolutionary change are for greater individuality, greater spiritual growth, for expressions that are humanistic, or to use a more immediate, New York word, for an existence that is more menschie, then certainly part—and a main part—of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence, and so on.To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist’s problem.— Robert Motherwell (1915–1991)

THE SUBLIME IN art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this