20th-century Artist Quotes

It seems to me that art is a great miracle-it is the showing forth of the Holy Spirit transubstantiation. It is to find and proclaim the poetry of life, without which there is no life.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

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.'

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

Richard Diebenkorn

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

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].

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 is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

I do consider my engaged poetry as a personal mission, a duty towards a society which evolves into a system of control of consciences: one even becomes a suspect for not thinking correctly!

Whether its [David] Berkowitz, whether its [Ted] Bundy, whether its Williams, Wayne Williams down in Atlanta or any of the others, or Charlie Manson—I don't comment about other cases for the simple fact is that I wasn't there.

John Wayne Gacy

I'll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn't know sad things now. After all I shouldn't complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can't imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers.

I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.

When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless. But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.

Stanley Spencer

We are getting mixed up with the French tradition. In talking about the necessity to 'finish' a thing, we then said American painters 'finish' a thing that looks 'unfinished', and the French, they 'finish' it. I have seen Henri Matisse's that were more 'unfinished' and yet more 'finished' than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in a terrific emotion at the time and he was more 'unfinished' than 'finished'.

William Baziotes

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

Rabih Alameddine

The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.

Religion without art is a dead system of dogmas which have no effect on life.

Anagarika Govinda

When Jackson talked about painting he didn't usurp anything that wasn't himself. He didn't want to change anything, he wasn't using any outworn attitude about it, he was always himself. He just wanted to be in it because he loved it. The response in the person's mind to that mysterious thing that has happened before has nothing to do with 'who did it first'. Tomlin however, did hear these voices and in reference to his early work and its relation to Braque, I like him for that. He was not an academician of Cubism even then; he was an extremely personal and sensitive artist.

I wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.

I didn't want to be a woman artist, I just wanted to be an artist.

Theirs is a story of African-American strength and courage. I share it now as my parents told it to me, because their struggles and triumphs ring true today. People all over the world are still on the move, trying to build better lives for themselves and for their families.

Somehow, one never really runs away, or I never have, and I find that the faster I go the more catches up with me... all the while time stands, to me, still - straight up and down like a great white sheet.

If the artist is not to lose much of his ancient purpose he may have to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his rightful inheritance.

Richard Hamilton (artist)

No piece of art can depict feelings if a piece of reality is not included in it.