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When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you become a soldier you’ll be a
general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
- Pablo Picasso
Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
- Al Capp
Art for art’s sake.
- Victor Coussin, 1818
Art for art’s sake makes no more sense than gin for gin’s sake.
- W. Somerset Maugham
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
I shut my eyes in order to see
- Paul Gauguin
Don’t talk to me of Gauguin. I’d like to wring the fellow’s neck!
- Paul Cézanne
A good painter is to paint two main things, namely men and the working of man’s mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.
- Auguste Renoir, of Leonardo da Vinci
There is nothing new in art except talent.
- Anton Chekhov
Art happens - no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence
cannot bring it about.
- James McNeill Whistler
A nation in which a congressman can seriously ask, “ Do you think the artist is a
special person?” Is a nation living in cultural jeopardy.
- James Thurber
All day long I add up columns of figures and make everything balance. I come home. I
sit down. I look at a Kandinsky and it’s wonderful! It doesn’t mean a damn thing!
- Solomon Guggenheim
With an apple I will astonish Paris.
- Paul Cézanne
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its
ass in a museum.
- Claus Oldenburg
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
- Picasso
A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.
- Grandma Moses
Bad artists always admire each other’s work.
- Oscar Wilde
A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved.
- Auguste Renoir
Less is more.
- Mies van der Rohe
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
- George Bernard Shaw
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
- Robert Motherwell
All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.
- Grant Wood
Once Degas witnessed one of his paintings sell at auction for $100,000. Asked how he
felt, he said, “I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.”
Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and pastures blue ought to be sterilized.
- Adolf Hitler
Beauty should be edible, or not at all.
- Salvador Dalí
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.
- Georges Rouault
In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
- Andy Warhol
Painting is an indoor art. You don’t put a Rembrandt on the lawn.
- Henry Moore
I am not interested in relationships of color or anything else . . . I am interested only in
expressing the basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
- Mark Rothko
I like painting on a square because you don’t have to decide whether it should be
longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter; it’s just a square.
- Andy Warhol
It would be terrific if everybody was alike. The reason I’m painting this way is
because I want to be a machine.
- Andy Warhol
Communism stifles art. There is little important art you can cite from Communist
countries. Solzhenitzyn is not nearly as impressive as Tolstoi.
- Richard Nixon
Half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden worrying about the noise of traffic on the
way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.
- Franz Kline
It gave me great pleasure to think that I could take wood, make it good, and make people like
Rockefeller buy it with paper money.
- Louise Nevelson
Great artists need great clients.
- I.M. Pei
If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint
at all?
- Georgia O’Keeffe
If my husband ever met a woman on the street who looked like one of his paintings he would
faint. (speaking of Pablo Picasso)
- Jacqueline Roque
A tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.
- Mark Twain. His description of Turner’s “The Slave Ship”
To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity
- Thomas A. Edison
In scorn or nature, art gave lifeless life.
- Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece”
None but blockheads copy each other.
- William Blake
People always confuse the man and the artist because chance has united them in the same body.
- Jules Renard
The artist and the censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent
body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
- G.J. Nathan
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his
living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
- George Bernard Shaw
Art’s cool.
- Bevis and Butthead (after cutting a section out of a Modigliani painting)
Edited by Jay Magidson, March 1995
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