Top 100 History Is Art Quotes
#1. Art history is fine. I mean, that's a discipline. Art history is art history, and you start from the beginning and you end up in artist in time. But art is a little bit different. Art is a conversation. And if there's no conversation, what the hell is it about?
Lawrence Weiner
#2. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
Derek Walcott
#3. Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling
in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.
Will Durant
#4. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#5. All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
Leslie Fiedler
#6. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.
David Coleman
#7. God is a geometrician.
Plato
#8. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.
Judy Chicago
#9. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#10. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron De Montesquieu
#11. An important document of the paper of record at a crucial, make-or-break juncture in its long, glorious history, and a love letter to the dying art form that is the great American newspaper.
Nathan Rabin
#12. I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.
Sean Scully
#13. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#14. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.
Kadir Nelson
#15. The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.
Jacques Chirac
#16. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
Julian Barnes
#17. The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
Roland Barthes
#18. History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art ...
Phyllis McGinley
#19. The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.
Andrew Hoberek
#20. For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.
David Salle
#21. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#22. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#23. Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.
Jean Piaget
#24. Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history.
Carlton J. H. Hayes
#25. To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
Thomas Huxley
#26. We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.
Susan Sontag
#28. It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.
B.J. Novak
#29. The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.
Kuo Pao Kun
#30. I love going to art galleries. The Tate Modern is one of my favourite things to do. But I don't invest in the history of it and I don't read up on it. I am a guy who would buy a print rather than buy an original.
James McAvoy
#31. The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.
Plato
#32. Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
Auguste Rodin
#33. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#34. I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
Camille Paglia
#35. If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death.
Ethan Hawke
#36. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#37. Only by assuming an infinitesimally small unit for observation - a differential of history (that is, the common tendencies of men) - and arriving at the art of integration (finding the sum of the infinitesimals) can we hope to discover the laws of history.
Leo Tolstoy
#38. There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.
Oswald Mosley
#39. What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
Johan Huizinga
#40. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.
Hussein Chalayan
#41. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.
Walter Shaw Sparrow
#42. Utrip makes it easy for travelers to experience the destination highlights that most interest them, be it food, art or history. Just like a culinary experience, every palate is different, and Utrip is all about personalizing travel for their users.
Tom Douglas
#43. I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.
Damien Chazelle
#44. Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John Fowles
#45. Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it.
Ian Bogost
#46. Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
Andre Suares
#48. The visual information of art history is going to students seamlessly, without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago.
Robert Nelson
#49. A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.
Robert Payne
#50. Art takes different forms ... But it represents something that is basic in all of us-our history.
George Clooney
#51. 'The Art of the Brick' is an exhibition I've done where I've taken some works of art from art history and replicated them all out of Lego bricks.
Nathan Sawaya
#52. The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.
John Ruskin
#53. All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Honore De Balzac
#54. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.
Saul Bellow
#55. In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.
Edgard Varese
#56. Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
#57. History is conjecture raised to the level of an art.
Marty Rubin
#58. Art has no answers, only solutions, and resolutions... Art has only vision and revision... Art has only hope and more hope... again and again, against circumstance and history... What we hope life might be, again and again, against what we see it has been. In hope, there is a reason to continue.
Israel Horovitz
#59. Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.
Mike Mills
#60. History has taught us that the idea of superpower is for a political maniac to design the art of control over other countries.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#61. It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.
Sverker Sorlin
#62. The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
Golda Meir
#63. Look to the Classics, History, to the Arts, for there is truth. Look away from the systems, the processes, the techniques.
Charles Guggenheim
#64. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money.
Don Simpson
#65. The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.
Robert Henri
#66. After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.
Jeffrey Deitch
#67. Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#68. The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.
Siri Hustvedt
#69. The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.
Robert Adams
#70. We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.
Kevin Rudd
#71. History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream ...
Lilian Whiting
#72. Tarot is a practice rich with history and cultural knowledge. It is a science of the mind.
Benebell Wen
#73. Art is far feebler than necessity.
Aeschylus
#74. Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.
Gerald Stern
#75. In the history of a soul's evolution there is a critical point of the human incarnation that decides for us whether we stay there, go down or progress upwards. There is a knot of worldly desires impeding us; cut the knot by mastering desires and go forward. This done, progress is assured.
Virchand Gandhi
#77. You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.
Rusty Schweickart
#78. The romance of the old West vanished so fast and so few ever did anything with it. Does it make you realize the importance of Art and how the main knowledge of history is through Art alone?
Laura Gilpin
#80. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanisms of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence, magic is a necessity of every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society.
Herbert Read
#81. The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
Walter Bagehot
#82. All art becomes history as soon as it is made, so it is inevitably part of a tradition. It doesn't matter a toss if it is in paint or in film; it is all art.
Gary Hume
#83. 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
#85. The voice of madness, for instance, is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long - and those of the Teatro have no voice at all, given their imponderably grotesque nature.
Thomas Ligotti
#86. Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless.
Honore De Balzac
#87. History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Joseph Conrad
#88. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.
Daniel Walker Howe
#89. For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions - art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself!
Joseph Conrad
#90. What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.
Felix Rohatyn
#91. Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness.
Max Ernst
#93. We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.
Kenneth Clark
#95. What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.
James Elkins
#96. The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
#97. Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
#98. If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.
George Crumb
#100. Information and inspiration are everywhere ... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.
John Howe
