Art History Quotes

“wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it ”
― Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, Vol. 29

“Ironically, I believe Picasso was right. I believe we could paint a better world if we learned to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing.

Picasso’s mistake was his arrogance. He assumed he could represent all of the perspectives. And our mistake was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl because we believed her potential would never equal his.

Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time.

A 17-year-old girl is just never, ever, ever in her prime! Ever. I am in my prime. Would you test your strength out on me?

There is no way anyone would dare test their strength out on me because you all know there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.”
― Terry Eagleton

“The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy

“A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.”
― Wendy Beckett, The Story of Painting

“And she wondered: if he were a painting, could she read him better?”
― Megan Scott, The Temptation of Magic

“‎I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples”
― Elizabeth Catlett, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico

“The artists of this nation - state are, taken as one historical subject, one of 'latecomers' to the smorgasbord of the artistic pantheon.Even if Sweden as a nation-state thus seems to have been excluded from the world art history its contemporary arts infrastructure presently makes the country a much more vital place of production.”
― Charlotte Bydler

“We lost Klimmt, Schiele and Moll”
― George Pratt, Enemy Ace: War Idyll

“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”
― Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

“The notion of displacement destabilizes spatial hierarchies of senders and receivers, and turns the issue of historical causality into one or more negotiable genealogy and interpretative communities.”
― Charlotte Bydler

“Nor is it only as a sign of greater gentleness or refinement of mind, but as a proof of the best possible direction of this refinement, that the tendency of the Gothic to the expression of vegetative life is to be admired. That sentence of Genesis, 'I have given thee every green herb for meat,' like all the rest of the book, has a profound symbolical as well as literal meaning. It is not merely the nourishment of the body, but the food of the soul, that is intended. The green herb is, of all nature, that which is most essential to the healthy spiritual life of man. Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not intended to be seen by all men, — perhaps their power is greatest. over those who are unaccustomed to them. But trees and fields and flowers were made for all, and are necessary for all. God has connected the labour which is essential to the bodily sustenance with the pleasures which are healthiest for the heart; and while He made the ground stubborn, He made its herbage fragrant, and its blossoms fair. The proudest architecture that man can build has no higher honour than to bear the image and recall the memory of that grass of the field which is, at once, the type and the support of his existence; the goodly building is then most glorious when it is sculptured into the likeness of the leaves of Paradise; and the great Gothic spirit, as we showed it to be noble in its disquietude, is also noble in its hold of nature; it is, indeed, like the dove of Noah, in that she found no rest upon the face of the waters, — but like her in this also, 'Lo, in her mouth was an olive branch, plucked off.”
― John Ruskin, On Art and Life

“The notions of hybridity, metissage, cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of these new configurations.”
― Okwui Enwezor

“So what's the point of longing for a new, monumental category hidden somewhere in the non-Western discourse? On the contrary, shouldn't we emphasize that Western art historical thinking has not necessarily to be regarded as monumental? This would be a good condition for dialogue with scholars who are not (or do not want to be) affiliated with "our" tradition.”
― Ralph Ubl

“The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity.”
― Charlotte Bydler

“The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.”
― Sverker Sörlin

“It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.”
― Sverker Sörlin

“Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.

It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom—then powerless to aid Him—He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.

In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Like art, sex is fraught with symbols. Family romance (Freud) means that adult sex is always representation, ritualistic acting out of vanished realities.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Even the most insignificant details acquire, under Giotto's brush, a poignant human interest.”
― Jaques Dupont and Cesare Gnudi

“The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that's there. We shouldn't think "This is good," or "This is bad," or "This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z." Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn't think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Ah… Yeah, it’s weird… We tell people to follow their dreams and when they do we call them losers for not being employable! Because they studied poetry and art history instead of engineering and medicine. We live in a terrible society!”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“Same-sex love has often been relegated to the margins of art as problematic (and preferably tragic).”
― R. B. Parkinson

“Same-sex love has often been relegated to the margins of art as problematic (and preferably tragic).”
― R.B. Parkinson, A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Around the World

“La historia del arte es una concatenación de rescates, rechazos e imitaciones en busca de la alteridad. Hay un replanteo permanente de los cánones históricos: incluyen lo que antes se excluía y excluyen lo que antes se incluía. La institución museística no sólo preserva el pasado en medio de la contemporaneidad, sino que también le ofrece a una generación viva, actual, una perspectiva después de la muerte.”
― Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork

“Our experiences shape the act of looking, so we all account for art in our own way.”
― John Finlay

“There is really no such thing as art history...only art historians...and the books that they write.”
― John-Paul Stonard

“And she wondered: if he were a painting, could she read him better?”
― Megan Scott, The temptation of magic