Art Quotes

“I project on the surface; that is, the essence of the subject must always become visible, even if this is impossible in nature, which is not adapted to this relief style. The absence of foreshortening also plays a crucial part in the process.. .For I have discovered a very small, undisputed, personal possession: a particular sort of three-dimensional representation on the flat surface.. .I am my style.”

“Everything that used to be foreign to me, at the rational procedures in my profession, I now begin to resort to after all, from necessity, at least as a matter of experiment. Apparently I am becoming perfectly sober and small, perfectly unpoetic and unenthusiastic. I imagine a very small formal motif and try to execute it economically.”

“Formerly it frequently happened to me that when questioned regarding a picture I simply did not know what it represented. I had not seen the subject, so to say. Now I have also included the content so that I know most of the time what is represented. But this only supports my experience that what matters in the ultimate end is the abstract meaning of harmonization (note from a letter, 1903)”

“Serious color studies of nudes and heads. Only as practice and first training. Very strict determination of color values through water color. On top of it, some oils, simply for blending. The results are quite unattractive, little of importance to be hoped for here. This month of February is devoted to color. I painted many nudes from nature and even the portrait of a head, my syster's!”

“Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

“I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black.”

“One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.”

“The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion.”

“Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.”

“The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore the object must be eliminated from the picture.”

“Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and colour and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.”

“Paint the feeling of the thing, not the thing itself.”

“It's not about what you're looking at; it's about how you see it.”

“Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.”

“Choose only one master — Nature.”

“Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.”

“Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.”

“Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it.”

“A work is finished when an artist realises he cannot add more with advantage.”

“Paint what you see, not what you think you see.”

“Loosen up, but don't be sloppy.”

“What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.”

“Pop Art is the use of commercial art as a subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it – everybody was hanging everything. It was almost acceptable to hang a dripping paint rag, everybody [in America, mainly in New York, 1950s] was accustomed to this. The one thing everyone hated was commercial art; and apparently they didn’t hate that enough either.”

“'How can you [accept] exploitation?' 'How can you like the complete mechanization of work?' 'How can you like bad art?' I have to answer that I accept it as being there, in the world.”

“I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comics are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We’re using those things – but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism and terrorism.”

“Organized perception is what is art all about.. .It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing...”

“My work is actually different from comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place, however slight the difference seems to some. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.”

“One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style. To express this thing in a painterly style would dilute it; the techniques I use are not commercial, they only appear to be commercial – and the ways of seeing and composing and unifying are different and have different ends.”

“Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values see more askew.. .I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial; it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it [Pop Art] won’t be American; it will be universal.”