Top 100 Art Subject Quotes
#1. New York is full of abandoned churches. A Godless city, but full of superstitions on every subject
art, money, sex, food, health.
Mason Cooley
#2. I tend to have a lot of jokes about ex-girlfriends. They always ask me if they will be the subject of a joke, and I always tell them they won't. Unless they do something crazy. They all tend to, so you know where that goes. There are no closed doors. The 'art' will suffer.
Adam DeVine
#3. A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
Oscar Wilde
#4. The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before,
Carl Sagan
#5. I see a flower. It gives me a sensation of the beautiful. I wish to paint it. And as soon as I wish to paint it I see the whole subject - flower - changed. It is now an art problem to resolve.
Georges Vantongerloo
#7. The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.
Susan Sontag
#8. Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
Jorge Luis Borges
#9. Philosophy does not claim to secure for us anything outside our control. Otherwise it would be taking on matters that do not concern it. For as wood is the material of the carpenter, and marble that of the sculptor, so the subject matter of the art of life is the life of the self.
Epictetus
#10. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.
Madeleine L'Engle
#11. Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
Robert Motherwell
#12. Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.
Agnes Martin
#13. Eakins rejected gentlemen athletics as his theme. Instead, he took a subject that had been the stuff of illustrated weeklies and the penny press and turned it into fine art. Eakins celebrates not fire from heaven but honest sweat, not genius but hard work.
Barry S. Strauss
#14. What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
Henri Matisse
#15. As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.
W. H. Auden
#16. An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
#17. Such ideas made him [Constable] a precursor of the essentially twentieth-century view that art and life are inseparable and there is no such thing as ideal subject-matter.
Neville Weston
#18. The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for "religious" art or "Catholic" art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.
Jacques Maritain
#19. Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
#20. As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#21. Art and money are closely related. Try sitting down with a group of artists and ask them what's on their mind. Very quickly the topic shifts to money. And it can be very hard to get them off that subject.
Dave Winer
#22. In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.
Alberto Giacometti
#23. Those arts which are, to be sure, not finite, as geometry and arithmetic, do not suffer adornment; others, contrarily, are rather subject to division and embellishment, such as astronomy and jurisprudence.
Gerolamo Cardano
#25. Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence ... are undermined.
Douglas Crimp
#26. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.
Ayn Rand
#27. The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.
Jerry Saltz
#28. The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.
Raymond Chandler
#29. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#30. The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.
James Gray
#32. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Julian Barnes
#33. I see the bomber pictures as an anti-war statement ... which they aren't - at all. Pictures like that don't do anything to combat war. They only show one tiny aspect of the subject of war - maybe only my own childish feelings of fear and fascination with war and with weapons of that kind.
Gerhard Richter
#34. To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires ... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.
Michael Snow
#35. Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.
Claes Oldenburg
#36. In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.
Edward Abbey
#37. In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#38. Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.
Jerry Saltz
#39. No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture - what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what.
Roger Fry
#40. There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.
Norman Foster
#41. The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.
Wassily Kandinsky
#42. The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#43. If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.
Christopher Nolan
#44. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
John Ashbery
#45. The real artist is striving to depict his subject's character and to stress the caricature, but at least it is art which is alive.
William Dobell
#46. The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.
Paul Klee
#47. The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.
Jeanette Winterson
#48. And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#49. One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
Edgar Degas
#50. Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.
William Baziotes
#51. Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.
Fran Lebowitz
#52. The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.
Gus Van Sant
#53. I didn't want make art about the internet at all. It's a really hard subject to take on and I did not set out to do that. But, it was real and it was what was happening.
Erika M. Anderson
#54. I don't think there's any border between science and art. All the fiction films I have made were always on the same subject, - a discovery of the "Other," an exploration of difference.
Jean Rouch
#55. A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter ...
Henri Matisse
#56. Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.
Peter Schjeldahl
#57. Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us.
Umberto Boccioni
#58. If the subject is in a suffering circumstance, it is all the more preferable to apply craft to the utmost. Call it art or not, we photographers should always try to pass on our observations with the utmost clarity.
Dennis Stock
#59. If a nonartist teaches a subject called art, it is nonart.
Ruth Asawa
#60. Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.
Kary Mullis
#61. Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.
SARK
#62. When you write something new about science, other scientists may not like it but they pay attention because it is subject to proof. When you write something new about art, it is subject only to the reader's discomfort, and will probably be rejected.
Walter Darby Bannard
#63. What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#64. Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that's all it is about is opinions.
Chick Corea
#66. Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
John Ruskin
#67. The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.
Flannery O'Connor
#68. Life is never beautiful, but only the pictures of life are so in the transfiguring mirror of art or poetry; especially in youth, when we do not yet know it. Many a youth would receive great peace of mind if one could assist him to this knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#69. The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon your relationship to your subject matter.
Keith Carter
#70. There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert
#71. The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.
Alain De Botton
#73. To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
W. H. Auden
#75. The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting.
Thomas Young
#76. Everything depends on the attitude of the artist toward his subject. It is essential.
Robert Henri
#77. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.
Madeleine L'Engle
#78. If women have failed to make "universal" art because we're trapped within the "personal," why not universalize the "personal" and make it the subject of our art?
Chris Kraus
#79. I think what's happened in art criticism, or art thinking, in last 30 or 40 years is a confusion between the "what" - the subject - and the "how." Most attention goes to the "what," but it's the "how" that's the important part - how something is brought into being.
Joe Bradley
#80. I think with art you have to do a bit of transforming of the subject to make the art worth having.
Matthew Collings
#81. The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
Oscar Wilde
#82. Pytheos made a mistake by not observing that the arts are each composed of two things, the actual work and the theory of it. One of these, the doing of the work, is proper to men trained in the individual subject, while the other the theory is common to all scholars.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#83. If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.
Madeleine L'Engle
#84. The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.
Peter Schjeldahl
#85. I'm inspired by everything, really. I'm inspired by locations and travel, I'm inspired by art and music, I'm inspired by people. When my curiosity peaks and I want to know everything about the subject, I want to know how I can get more deeply involved.
Sophia Bush
#86. In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.
That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.
Ayn Rand
#87. If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.
Ben Shahn
#88. I chose faces and figures as my subject matter simply due to the fact that the human form is already beautiful art.
Frank Bruno
#89. We often hear the terms 'positional' and 'tactical' used as opposites. But this is as wrong as to consider a painting's composition unrelated to its subject. Just as there is no such thing as 'artistic' art, so there is no such thing as 'positional' chess.
Samuel Reshevsky
#90. In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.
Andre Malraux
#91. But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know.
James Atlas
#92. I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#93. The fact is that even art is subject to fashion.
Hugo Pratt
#94. In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.
Herbert Spencer
#95. The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
Sun Tzu
#96. Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. SO for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time.
Peter Drucker
#97. The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.
Gertrude Stein
#98. In school, some of my favorite subjects ... I mean, art was my favorite subject. I loved art! I used to go during lunch time to the art room and paint or draw or something.
Derek Hough
#99. Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
#100. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
Vladimir Nabokov
