ART QUOTES VI
quotations about art
When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. AUDEN
"A Poet of the Actual", Forewords and Afterwords
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
JEAN COCTEAU
Newsweek, May 16, 1955
Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On the Level of Desire"
But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
JOHN BARTH
attributed, Writers Dreaming
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
NORMAN MAILER
Western Review, winter 1959
When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
JAMES BALDWIN
Esquire, April 1960
Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?
Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
AMY LOWELL
Tendencies in Modern Poetry
I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
TONI MORRISON
Sula
Nature is a haunted house -- but Art -- a House that tries to be haunted.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876
The arts stop society going rotten and mad.
VANESSA REDGRAVE
interview, FT Magazine, Apr. 26, 2013
The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.
EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES
"A Landscape in Oils"
Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Art Objects