Randall Jarrell - Art Quotes

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Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Randall Jarrell
My destiny is accomplished and I die content. How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values—though not, perhaps, the final ones—of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.

Randall Jarrell
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

Randall Jarrell
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Randall Jarrell
First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation, a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.

Randall Jarrell
What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who held the mirror up to nature would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art's fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention—the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on—is as much of a signature as anything in it.

Randall Jarrell
We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life — in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access — unwillingly accuses our lives.

Randall Jarrell
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair—holding his wrists like Lifar—and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

Randall Jarrell
The work of art is as done as it will ever get, and all the critics in the world can't make its crust a bit browner; they may help us, the indigent readers, but they haven't done a thing to it. Around the throne of God, where all the angels read perfectly, there are no critics – there is no need for them.

Randall Jarrell
A few weeks ago I read, in Sacheverell Sitwell, two impressives sentences: It is my belief that I have informed myself of nearly all works of art in the known world.... I have heard most of the music of the world, and seen nearly all the paintings. It was hard for me to believe these sentences, but I wanted Sitwell to be able to say them, liked him for having said them—I believed.

Randall Jarrell
The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers's] work is More! More! —but as Tolstoy says, A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion ; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.

Randall Jarrell
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.

Randall Jarrell
Taking the chance of making a complete fool of himself — and, sometimes, doing so — is the first demand that is made upon any real critic: he must stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he is to be of any real use to art.

Randall Jarrell
It is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art; and yet how few of these give a truthful account of what it was like to be an ugly duckling!—it is almost as if the grown, successful swan had repressed most of the memories of the duckling's miserable, embarrassing, magical beginnings. (The memories are deeply humiliating in two ways: they remind the adult that he was once more ignorant and gullible and emotional than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is.)

Randall Jarrell
Miss Rasmussen made a welded sculpture. Her statues were—as she would say, smiling—untouched by human hands; and they looked it. You could tell one from another, if you wanted to, but it was hard to want to. You felt, yawning: It's ugly, but is it Art?
Miss Rasmussen also designed furniture, but people persisted in sitting down in her sculpture, and in asking What is that named? of her chairs. This showed how advanced her work was, and pleased her; yet when she laughed to show her pleasure, her laugh sounded thin and strained.

Randall Jarrell