Quotes About Art History

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!

Emmy Rossum

#4. It's very true that an artist who networks well will have better opportunities than one who doesn't network well. But great networking skills without great art won't change art history.

Mark Kostabi

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

Adam Gopnik

#8. For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

David Salle

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Drawing from art history and mythology allows me to connect with viewers in a familiar, yet loose visual framework. Blending disparate histories and themes can give the overall presentation a recognizable, yet unique flavor.

John Dyer Baizley

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I'd love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities.

Mia Wasikowska

#16. I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

Judy Chicago

#17. Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.

Jerry Saltz

#18. My art history papers were really politics. They were about the manifestation of culture through the eye of political events. So there was always that refusal to settle in one place, or one discipline or medium.

Roselee Goldberg

#19. Reps once took chances on art, History's most treasured musicians were believed in and cultivated to reach their potential. Today, it would be difficult for those musicians to get deals.

Steve Vai

#20. If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

#21. 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

#22. '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

#23. I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

Vera Wang

#24. I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

LeRoy Neiman

#25. In college I had to major in something, so I was like, "Okay I like art history, so I will major in that." I never really had any ambitions to work in museums or anything, though.

Walter Martin

#26. In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.

Denise Mina

#27. I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I'm really mad for art history and the masters mostly.

Robert Barry

#28. I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

Jeff Koons

#29. When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.

Werner Herzog

#30. I didn't go to art school. So, I never had this moment of taking time to actually learn how to make things and learn about art history and learn about people that came before me.

Agathe Snow

#31. At times there seems to be a million ideas worth painting. However, there are days when it's a challenge to pull any idea together. On these days I go to my studio, leaf through an art history book, and tell myself that I am part of this great tradition.

James Dean

#32. As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.

Eric Drooker

#33. I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.

Philip Treacy

#34. I was born in a suburb outside of Philadelphia called Lower Merion. After taking many leaves of absence, I just received my BA from NYU in Art History. I initially gravitated towards singing. Acting sort of sprang out of that as a means to participate in musicals.

Gideon Glick

#35. I grew up on a farm with only two TV channels. I didn't grow up around much culture. When I got excited about painting, I never really got further than what would have been in a modern art history textbook.

Neil Farber

#36. The Metropolitan Museum has all of our collections online, all our scholarly publications and catalogues since 1965. We have online features like the timeline of art history.

Thomas P. Campbell

#37. I didn't get a Bachelor's degree - I got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, which means I didn't have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times.

Stephen Furst

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Robert Smithson

#41. I have a strong art-history background.

Eli Roth

#42. Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

Susan Vreeland

#43. I love art, my mother is a painter, I majored in art history at Wellesley, and as I was having my second child I was thinking, what am I going to do, I have to do something to keep myself sane, and I began to ask myself, what are the most horrific circumstances under which art can be created?

Alyson Richman

#44. What a major mistake, having rejected pretty much all of the great talented female artists that have lived throughout the ages, art history is left incomplete. The validity of the written art history is as absent as those women left out.

Siren Waroe

#45. I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine.

Gideon Glick

#46. The good news was that "biology" turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way "art history" would at the Met or "trust fund" at the MoMA.

Sloane Crosley

#47. 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

#48. Listening to the radio every day for an entire year was a prison sentence. It was the most depressing, annoying, debilitating project I have ever undertaken, and I have a master's degree in art history.

Sarah Vowell

#49. I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

Black Francis

#50. I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

Pamela Hanson

#51. There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

Robert Nelson

#52. The term 'Pre-Raphaelite' is in danger of becoming one of the most misused tags in art history

Christopher Wood

#53. I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

Helen Vendler

#54. It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it.

Robert M. Pirsig

#55. I wanted to go into art history. Acting fell into my lap when a neighbor took pictures of me and showed them to an agent.

Eva Mendes

#56. I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.

Barry McGee

#57. I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

Ad Reinhardt

#58. The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Margaret Atwood

#59. I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

Jandy Nelson

#60. As the spiral of modern art history continues to wind down, we can see the increasing demand for tradition in the visual arts.

Igor Babailov

#61. You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

Chuck Close

#62. An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long.

Robert Longo

#63. 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

#64. When I was taking art history I was always angry that we would skip certain chapters because "it wasn't important." Like, "Let's skip over the Japanese. Let's just get to Giotto, because that's where everything begins." It's like, no. Everything is relevant to me.

Ali Banisadr

#65. I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

Sheila Heti

#66. I am a failed architect, if I'm honest. I got a degree in art history and was about to get another degree, in architecture, but realized I would be terrible at building things because I've got really bad spatial awareness.

Hannah Ware

#67. I do have a tendency to want to go back to school at all times in my life. Maybe I'll do the Ph.D. in art history when I'm 50, or maybe divinity school. I like teaching, too.

Jandy Nelson

#68. Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

Peter M. Brant

#69. I don't think it's necessary for artists to have any formal training in painting or art history, but I do think it's essential to continually experiment with different subject matter, types of paint and methods of painting.

Ron Parker

#70. Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Harold Rosenberg

#71. I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.

David Rockefeller

#72. I grew up in Rome, in actually what I would say was a liberal, open-minded family. My father was an architect and my mother was a teacher of art history, so it was sort of intellectual, and maybe a bit much for me when I was a child.

Frida Giannini

#73. I really wasn't about to get a Ph.D. in art history, you know, which you'd absolutely needed. And that was not something I wanted. And I loved art history, but not that way.

Robert Barry

#74. Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.

Camille Paglia

#75. Art history is a global version of that old children's game Chinese whispers.

Grayson Perry

#76. Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.

Jessi Klein

#77. Maybe philosophy - I love talking about ideas. Or maybe art history. I was thinking about psychology, then I got really afraid because everybody says it's terribly boring.

Claire Danes

#78. Men, not only in Turkish society but everywhere, have been the bosses in terms of creation. If you look at art history, women were the objects. The fact that it's not been made by women means that the subjects are not women.

Deniz Gamze Erguven

#79. In the USA, we learn "art history" as Western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy.

Jay L. Garfield

#80. Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women's studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffee house to help cover the rent.

Neil Gaiman

#81. Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

Kenneth Clark

#82. I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

George Hickenlooper

#83. The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

Albert Einstein

#84. 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

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

Emma Anderson

#86. 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

#87. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Derek Walcott

#88. 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

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

Alfred De Vigny

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

Theodor W. Adorno

#91. All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Leslie Fiedler

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. God is a geometrician.

Plato

#95. 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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Hannah Arendt

#98. 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

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

Tom Bissell

#100. 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