Quotes on Art

Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer

If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color.

I have touched with a sense of art some people-they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?

I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.

Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation.

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.

There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line… From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.