Works Of Art Quotes - Page 24

• In the sky we had rediscovered the moving principle of any work of art: the light, and the motion of color.

  Sonia Delaunay

  Art, Moving, Sky

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• A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached. Whether people are artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.

  Joseph Beuys

  Art, Democracies Have, Nurse

  1972 From an interview with G Jappe (translated by J Wheelwright), in Studio International, vol.184, no.950, Dec. Quoted in C Harrison and P Wood (eds) Art in Theory 1900-1990 (1992).

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• The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

  Georg Brandes

  Art, Past, Men

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• The person who appreciates a great work of art has the feeling that the work grows in him as he becomes involved in a prolonged capturing of emerging marginal meanings. He feels that he, too, is creative, that he himself is adding to his experience and understanding. Moreover, he wants to confront the work of art many times. He is not easily tired of it, as he would be had he read a purely logical statement. He realizes that the work of art does not merely transmit information; it produces pleasure.

  Silvano Arieti

  Art, Tired, Appreciate

  Silvano Arieti (1976). “Creativity: The Magic Synthesis”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• A work of art doesn't dare you to realize it. It germinates and gestates by itself.

  John Huston

  Art, Realizing, Dare

  1982 Reply to a tribute from the Directors Guild of America. Reported in Variety, 26 Apr.

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• It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Sight, Discovery

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.74, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Art, Philosophy, Exercise

  "Hegel: A Reinterpretation". Book by W. Kaufmann, 1966.

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• The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

  John Dewey

  Art, Judging, Perception

  1934 Art as Experience.

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• If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Action, Painting

  Marshall McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye (1987). “Letters of Marshall McLuhan”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them - without distortion which would mar their exact significances - into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

  William Carlos Williams

  Art, Men, Expression

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

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• First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.

  Randall Jarrell

  Art, Book, Wife

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture" (p. 211), 1980.

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• A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Art, Perfect, Doe

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1850). “The optimist”, p.18

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• Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Real, Essentials

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.207, Shambhala Publications

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• It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

  Piet Mondrian

  Art, Strong, Curves

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• History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.

  Andre Malraux

  Art, Understanding, May

  "Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Part IV, Chapter VI, 1951.

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• Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art.

  Andre Malraux

  Art, Feelings, Trying

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, art I, Chapter III, 1953.

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• Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation.

  Michael Ayrton

  Art, Metaphor, Depiction

  Michael Ayrton (1971). “The Rudiments of Paradise: Various Essays on Various Arts”

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• Not every work of art is or need be a heavily profound statement.

  Freeman Patterson

  Art, Profound, Needs

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• I view all art as an effort to translate brain concepts into a work. These brain concepts are synthetic ones - the result of many experiences. But a single work of art, or even a series of works, more often than not cannot translate these synthetic concepts adequately. Yves Saint Laurent once said that he suffered greatly when creating. He is not alone in that. Most artists do the same and say as much.

  Semir Zeki

  Art, Views, Creating

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• Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.

  Andre Malraux

  Art, Struggle, Dark

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, Part IV, Chapter VII, 1953.

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• I believe that the making of art is primarily for the benefit of the artist. If what the artist has created communicates messages and feelings to others, then it is because of the universality of the human experience that is speaking through the work of art.

  David Walker

  Art, Believe, Communication

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• If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Imagination, World

  Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.13, Penguin UK

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• I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Country, Art, Thinking

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• Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, and cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product.

  Richard McKenna

  Art, Responsibility, Men

  Richard McKenna (1972). “New eyes for old: nonfiction writings”, John F Blair Pub

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• Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.

  Robin G. Collingwood

  Art, Views, Giving

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