20th-century Artist Quotes

Salvador Dali

Andy Warhol

Frida Kahlo

Joan Miró

Günter Grass

Henry Moore

Max Ernst

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there – even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Porter

To be a surrealist... means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

I like church. It's empty when I go. I walk around. There are so many beautiful Catholic churches in New York.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

On his 1985 book, In The American West

The figure is still the only thing I have faith in in terms of how much emotion it's charged with and how much subject matter is there.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Annie Leibovitz

I strive to express the spiritual nature of the Universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Richard Pousette-Dart

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

Become one with eternity.
Become part of your environment.
Take off your clothes.
Forget yourself. Make love.
Self-destruction is the only
way to peace.

There are hurts so deep that one cannot reach them or heal them with words.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Mathematicians who build new spaces and physicists who find them in the universe can profit from the study of pictorial and architectural spaces conceived and built by men of art.

It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.

Francis Bacon (artist)

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957].

I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers... only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.

Norman Rockwell

Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

Richard Diebenkorn

I've never claimed that this is investment art. When we first started out, all the art colleges and universities across the country would sort of badmouth what we were doing. It's funny that a lot of them now are sending us letters saying, 'We may not totally agree with the way you paint, but we appreciate what you're doing, because you're sending literally thousands of people into art colleges.'

By contemplation I swear,
By the beginning of speech,
By the flight of a dove from the mind.
A word is in the cage

For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means.