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Art Quotes

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Art Quotes

“Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.”

FirstsLooksLittlesArtStillsWarFactsPastRememberFallCenturyObjectsEasierErrorsDecadesInevitableSurvivedAdoreGreat ArtNazismRise And FallEruptionWar Of 1812
Author:Michael Cunningham
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“It is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition. It is the business of Art to give things shape. Anyone who takes no delight in the firm outline of an object, or in its essential character, has no artistic sense. He cannot even be nourished by Art. Like Ephraim, he feeds upon the East wind, which has no boundaries.”

GivingArtCharacterProcessObjectsWindShapesEssentialsPerceptionDefinitionsDelightEastBoundariesArtisticFirmOutlinesNo Boundaries
Author:Vance Palmer
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“For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.”

WorldYearsArtFacesStepsModernObjectsDependsElementsHundredMovedLeavingPainterArrangementsHostilityMonumentModernismImitatingSuperbIncessant
Book:The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell
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“It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted.”

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Book:Discourses on Painting and the Fine Arts, Delivered at the Royal Academy
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“The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.”

ArtRealityStudySeeingObjectsModels
Book:The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Containing His Discourses, Idlers, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, and His Commentary on Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting; to which is Prefixed an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author by Edward Malone
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“Natural writers will often try to force themselves into a form - novel, story, screenplay, or poem - that is not necessarily the appropriate form for the way they see the world... if, in fact, they are writing from the artist's impulse, which is a deep, inchoate vision of some sort of order behind the apparent chaos of life on planet earth, they'll be driven then to express that vision in the creation of the object - the art object.”

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Author:Robert Olen Butler
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“The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.”

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Book:Selections From the Works of John Ruskin
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