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Artist Quotes

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Artist Quotes

“To understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to understand artists. Art is freedom - freedom of expression - and its message has resonated through society for centuries.”

Art Artist Streets Century Expression Wall Messages Art Is Freedom Of Expression Occupy Wall Street

Author:Peter M. Brant

“It is my opinion that the 21st century will be the century of play, and the heteroglossic activity of artists in the 20th century has been the forecast.”

Has Beens Play Artist Opinion Century Activity 21st Century 20th Century Forecasts

Author:Brian Sutton-Smith

“To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly.”

Art Past Artist Century Painting Masters Yesterday Historian Giotto

Author:Walter Darby Bannard

“It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.”

Years May Happens Artist Values Next Century Late Hundred Novelists Present Day Craftsman

Book:The world of Evelyn Waugh

Source: The world of Evelyn Waugh

“The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, "Why are there no great women artists?" it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.”

Source: The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work

“If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.”

Ifs Humans Persons Art Lasts Artist Consciousness Century Dangerous Position Activity Tasks Secular Frontiers Unprecedented Stature Human Activity Autonomous Secular Society

Author:Susan Sontag

“Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.”

Lasts Artist Grace Century Painter Feminine Elegant Delicacy

Author:Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.”

Ifs Important Seems Artist Century Emotional Painting Importance Contact

Author:James Elkins

“For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation's advancement. I wanted to go a step further and extend the boundaries.”

Has Beens Art Reality Wanted Artist Next Steps Generations Century Art Is Discovery Boundaries Data Visuals Exploration Next Generation Advancement Contributing

Book:Breaking the rules: Audrey Flack, a retrospective 1950-1990

Source: Breaking the rules: Audrey Flack, a retrospective 1950-1990

“Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.”

Art Seems Artist Century Masters Function Museums Masterpiece Clown Explosives

Book:5001 Nights at the Movies

Source: 5001 Nights at the Movies

“The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.”

“Norman Rockwell, the Brueghel of the 20th century bourgeoisie, the Holbein of Jell-O ads and magazine covers; by common assent, the most American artist of all.”

Artist Common Century Magazines Ads 20th Century Bourgeoisie Magazine Covers

Author:Jerry Adler

“Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.”

Years Artist Next Cases Century Winter Bridges

Author:Andy Goldsworthy

“And their pals vote for their stuff when they're not on the panel, and it just keeps going that way. And they tend to be very fringe artists, so anything before the 20th century is not worth considering. This is out of date.”

Way Artist Stuff Century Vote Keep Going Considering 20th Century Fringe Pals

Author:Charlton Heston

“One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye. I subscribe enthusiastically to this.”