Harold Rosenberg Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it... Advanced art today is no longer a cause – it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg
What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Harold Rosenberg
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Harold Rosenberg
How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

Harold Rosenberg
The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

Harold Rosenberg
Action Painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.

Harold Rosenberg
Not only the artist but everyone "becomes someone else" in becoming someone. One is thought about, thus invented. Or as Steinberg put it with memorable succinctness in his Cogito drawings, "I think, therefore Descartes is." One creates not oneself but another. Being is in the act.

Harold Rosenberg
The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

Harold Rosenberg
The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art but to release himself from it, in order to replace it with his own history. However the historical pattern is drawn, it will not fit the developing sensibility of the individual.

Harold Rosenberg
It is not logical for art to be logical. Art goes against the grain of the times as readily as it goes with it and at the very same moment. Instead of seeking the nearest exit, art responds to a new situation by uncovering a labyrinth of problems.

Harold Rosenberg
For the artist, fulfillment of self consists not in marching in the ranks of the liberators but in being entered in the roll of the Masters. The artist tends to find himself in the position of a deserter from his social group — or, at best, one who collaborates, with secret reservations.

Harold Rosenberg
Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

Harold Rosenberg
Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

Harold Rosenberg
Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.

Harold Rosenberg
The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all times and places stands against him as an entity with objectives and values of its own. In turn, since becoming aware of the organized body of artworks as the obstacle to his own aesthetic self-affirmation, the artist is pushed toward anti-intellectualism and willful dismissal of the art of the past.

Harold Rosenberg
As with other modern artists, his readings provided not an organized outlook but a kind of metaphysical hum that surrounded his mental operations. His thinking was truly systematic only when it dealt with achieving the reality of the art object as a "creation out of nothing," which was a common theme in New York art after the last war and the break with the European past.

Harold Rosenberg
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

Harold Rosenberg
The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.

Harold Rosenberg
Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

Harold Rosenberg
Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

Harold Rosenberg
The interval during which a painting is mistaken for the real thing, or a real thing for a painting, is the triumphant moment of trompe l'oeil art. The artist appears to be potent as nature, if not superior to it. Almost immediately, though, the spectator's uncertainty is eliminated by his recognition that the counterfeit is counterfeit. Once the illusion is dissolved, what is left is an object that is interesting not as a work of art but as a successful simulation of something that is not art. The major response to it is curiosity: "How did he do it?"

Harold Rosenberg
One cannot, however, avoid saying a few words about individuals who lay down the law to art in the name of art history. Art criticism today is beset by art historians turned inside out to function as prophets of so-called inevitable trends. A determinism similar to that projected into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making. In this parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of development, and an ultimatum is issued to artists either to accommodate themselves to these values or be banned from the art of the future.

Harold Rosenberg
Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Harold Rosenberg
Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.

Harold Rosenberg
Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.

Harold Rosenberg
The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.

Harold Rosenberg
If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.

Harold Rosenberg
Illusionistic art appeals to what the public knows not about art but about things. This ability to brush art aside is the secret of the popularity of illusionism. Ever since the Greeks told of painted grapes being pecked by real birds, wonder at skill in deceiving the eye has moved more people than appreciation of aesthetic quality. But for art to depend exclusively upon reproducing appearances has the disadvantage of requiring that the painting or sculpture conform to the common perception of things.

Harold Rosenberg
Art is the laboratory for making new men.

Harold Rosenberg
In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.

Harold Rosenberg