Art Quotes

“It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.”

-- Arthur Erickson

“In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.”

-- Rabindranath Tagore

“Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.”

-- Harry S. Truman

“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”

-- Honore de Balzac

“Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.”

-- Robert Frost

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

-- Ansel Adams

“Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.”

-- Camille Paglia

“I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.”

-- Judy Chicago

“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”

-- Ambrose Bierce