Top 36 Art Historical Quotes
#1. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.
John Lanchester
#2. There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.
Jeffrey Deitch
#3. The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.
Ezra Pound
#4. To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Adolf Hitler
#5. Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
Joyce Carol Oates
#6. Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.
Allen Tate
#7. 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
#8. As discussed earlier, when it comes to music, most of us tend to have confidence in our taste even though we may totally lack knowledge regarding historical development or compositional theory. I frequently hear, "I don't know anything about art" but hardly ever, "I don't know anything about music".
Michael Findlay
#9. The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) andsets (transparencies, film strips, etc.). Its main purpose is to place the staged events in their historical context.
Bertolt Brecht
#10. I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#11. I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
Howard Hodgkin
#12. Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
Harold Rosenberg
#13. For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
#14. As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Adrienne Rich
#15. What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.
'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.
Natasha Pulley
#16. [The] subjective [historical] element in geologic studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists: one considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science.
Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen
#17. Rome is the city above all cities which loses most of its meaning to those who do not bring to it some historical sense, a decent knowledge of art, and a good amount of time. Rome therefore is particularly disturbing to an American.
Clare Boothe Luce
#18. I've never kissed an art forger before" Lord Huntington to Eliza Somerton in "An Artful Seduction
Tina Gabrielle
#19. Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
Johan Huizinga
#20. I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.
Michael Heizer
#21. At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.
Rafael Moneo
#22. That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
Kehinde Wiley
#23. Rama is a fairly common name in India. It symbolizes an individual who is interested both in enlightenment and martial arts. I do not claim to have any past life connection with the historical Rama. It's just a name I liked.
Frederick Lenz
#24. The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.
Clement Greenberg
#25. No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important.
Mark Kostabi
#26. In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.
George Grosz
#28. Anyone who knew the recipe of the alchemists could make gold, but only the artisans of Murano could make glass so fine, one could nearly touch one's fingers together on either side; cristallo without an imperfection or blemish, clear as the sky, with a sparkle to rival that of diamonds.
Ruth Nestvold
#29. I...I am guilty only of love."
"Thou art a fornicator, an unclean Jezebel!
Virginia Aird
#30. For all those who are interested in the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, esthetic, historical or any other aspects of our dance art ... It is high time that our universities had faculties for dance, giving the art its due place in the academic world.
Padma Subrahmanyam
#31. "Contemporary art" for me is a kind of historical term that describes the 40 years between the Berlin Wall going up and then coming down. I'm not sure who will come up with a better term to describe art, but I think contemporary art is actually done for.
Liam Gillick
#32. We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.
Orhan Pamuk
#33. Tattooing is historical, cultural and a great form of art but it should always be safe for both the client and the tattoo practitioner.
William Webb
#34. Follow your heart as long as you live ... Bring your whole heart towards excellence ... And no limit may be set to art.
The Instruction Of Ptahhotop
#35. The purer the artist's 'mirror' is, the more true reality reflects in it. Overseeing the historical culture of art, we must conclude that the mirror only slowly is purified. Time producing this purifying shows a gradual, more constant and objective image of reality.
Piet Mondrian
#36. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.
Mark Twain
