History Of Art Quotes

#1. 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

#2. If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years.

Mark Edward

#3. 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

#4. In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.

Andre Malraux

#5. Perhaps we might, within the anatomy of our imaginations, think once more of the naked body as a vessel of grace, taste and wonder. In the spotted history of art, stranger things have happened.

Robert Genn

#6. There have been countless changes in the long history of art. The most significant have been brought about by the genius of a single artist.

Thomas Hoving

#7. 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

#8. I graduated. I did History of Art, you know, all those things - American Studies - and then I went to art school, and I did Joseph Alvarez in the art school.

Peter Beard

#9. Why would anyone even bring up the issue (of the statues) in a country where there are more than 10 state-owned institutions that teach sculpting and more than 20 others that teach the history of art?

Gamal El-Ghitani

#10. You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.

Frank Fairfield

#11. 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.

#12. I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.

Karen DeCrow

#13. The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

Siri Hustvedt

#14. 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

#15. I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

Philip Pullman

#16. 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

#17. It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard ... Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.

Charles De Lint

#18. The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

Susan Sontag

#19. I'm not really well educated - other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

Marc Jacobs

#20. In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.

Richard Powers

#21. I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

Herb Ritts

#22. Throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art ... today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself.

Van Deren Coke

#23. Beauty is the product of the dominant ideology. (Thus when ideology changes, the ideal body follows.) We can see that in the history of art.

Orlan

#24. And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.

Richard Bach

#25. Art lives and dies in the unique heart of he who carries it, just as all feelings only live and expand in the souls of those who feel them. There is no history of art
there is the history of artists.

Marianne Von Werefkin

#26. I think a lot of male artists should and probably are thinking in the same ways. The culture has moved in a more democratic, pluralistic direction. You now find a lot of people who are looking outside of the mainstream of the history of art for their mentors. Maybe not heroes, but mentors.

Laura Owens

#27. As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future.

Van Deren Coke

#28. The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man affirms his mental scheme, and these symbols, be they pictorial or mathematical, a fable or formula, will reflect the same changes.

Kenneth Clark

#29. That's the history of art - you have to consider yourself fortunate if you ever get acknowledged. If you have a critical success that's also a financial success and that you feel good about ... If things line up, that's pretty rare.

Richard Linklater

#30. I'm interested in vernacular cultures, where people lived a little closer to the source of materials and the making of objects for use. And for me, not to rely strictly on the history of art has always been an interesting process, to be looking into areas that we call craft and trades.

Martin Puryear

#31. The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

Edgar Degas

#32. Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.

Martin Filler

#33. What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.

Emir Kusturica

#34. As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art ...

Milton Resnick

#35. The history of art is the history of revivals.

Samuel Butler

#36. In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

Janet Flanner

#37. The people of Texas are rightly proud of their own, just like the French and the Italians, but visiting artists have often been given a shot in the history of art.

Clifford Ross

#38. The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.

Harold Rosenberg

#39. The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats.

Frank Fairfield

#40. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.

Gil Scott-Heron

#41. No, my degree was history, not the practice of art! I can't draw to save my life you know.

Emma Anderson

#42. I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?

Mark Bradford

#43. 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

#44. Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.

Sarah Hall

#45. 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

#46. Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

Alfred De Vigny

#47. The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

Theodor W. Adorno

#48. 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

#49. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Sherwood Anderson

#50. 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

#51. I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.

William Shakespeare

#52. With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.

Hannah Arendt

#53. Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

#54. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

Tom Bissell

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

Rashid Johnson

#60. The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

Jacques Chirac

#61. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

Chris Marker

#62. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

Julian Barnes

#63. Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

Adam Gopnik

#64. 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

#65. History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art ...

Phyllis McGinley

#66. The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.

Andrew Hoberek

#67. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.

William Poundstone

#68. How could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history - not to mention the history of a world war - simply become a forgotten footnote? But that's exactly what happened.

Robert M. Edsel

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

Ruth Benedict

#72. I've worked with more than 50 directors and I've paid attention since day one. That's pretty much been my education, apart from studying art history and shooting with my own cameras. I've seen 50 different sets of mistakes and 50 different ways of achieving.

Tommy Lee Jones

#73. Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

Jean Piaget

#74. 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

#75. We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.

Susan Sontag

#76. The entrenched interests of the regional nobility prevented the proper functioning of a government built upon ethical practice. While high-minded scholars often called for reforms, their memoranda carried little weight with an idle aristocracy.

Joan Stanley-Baker

#77. 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

#78. My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.

Patricia Polacco

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. I went to college to be a jock and to play on the baseball team. And then, I got cut and realized that that was it for that. I was really small. The other guys were really big, on that team. I was a bit of a theater nerd, and I was an art history major.

Charlie Day

#82. The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.

Plato

#83. Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.

Sheryl Crow

#84. The golden section was discovered by the Egyptians, and has been used in art and architecture, most commonly, during the classical ages of Egypt and Greece.

Steven L. Griffing

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.

Lorenzo Ghiberti

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.

Johan Huizinga

#93. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Tom Stoppard

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it

Bob Ross

#97. There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

Ansel Adams

#98. On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.

Alex Shakar

#99. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt

#100. 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