Art History Quotes

“wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it ”
― Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, Vol. 29

“Ironically, I believe Picasso was right. I believe we could paint a better world if we learned to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing.

Picasso’s mistake was his arrogance. He assumed he could represent all of the perspectives. And our mistake was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl because we believed her potential would never equal his.

Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time.

A 17-year-old girl is just never, ever, ever in her prime! Ever. I am in my prime. Would you test your strength out on me?

There is no way anyone would dare test their strength out on me because you all know there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
― Hannah Gadsby

“Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.”
― Terry Eagleton

“The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy

“A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.”
― Wendy Beckett, The Story of Painting

“‎I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples”
― Elizabeth Catlett, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico

“The artists of this nation - state are, taken as one historical subject, one of 'latecomers' to the smorgasbord of the artistic pantheon.Even if Sweden as a nation-state thus seems to have been excluded from the world art history its contemporary arts infrastructure presently makes the country a much more vital place of production.”
― Charlotte Bydler

“We lost Klimmt, Schiele and Moll”
― George Pratt, Enemy Ace: War Idyll

“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”
― Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

“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

“The notions of hybridity, metissage, cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of these new configurations.”
― Okwui Enwezor

“So what's the point of longing for a new, monumental category hidden somewhere in the non-Western discourse? On the contrary, shouldn't we emphasize that Western art historical thinking has not necessarily to be regarded as monumental? This would be a good condition for dialogue with scholars who are not (or do not want to be) affiliated with "our" tradition.”
― Ralph Ubl

“The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity.”
― Charlotte Bydler

“The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.”
― Sverker Sörlin

“It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.”
― Sverker Sörlin

“Because we are all human and there by share a
neurological apparatus of vision which we can take, save for cases of obvious malfunction, as behaving in the same way for everyone, there seems no reason to doubt that what a painter understands by, say, a hand
is exactly what everyone understands by it. Yet how can we be sure that visual experience is universally similar? What guarantees the guarantee?”
― Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze

“Renaissance painters saw everything from one perspective, photographically, "realistically," but medieval painters looked at a scene from several different perspectives at once. A medieval picture looked at with this in mind becomes very exciting indeed. It is as if the artist is everywhere at once: the castle is tiny as if seen from afar; the men on its battlements huge as if encountered face to face; this lake is seen from that distance and that tree from this.”
― Jeffrey Burton Russell, Medieval Civilization

“Like art, sex is fraught with symbols. Family romance (Freud) means that adult sex is always representation, ritualistic acting out of vanished realities.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Most visibly and politically effectual were the twelve large-scale photographs by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin (b. 1961) forming the exhibition Ecce Homo (1998). The photographs depict classical situations in the life of Christ, but they are staged in contemporary settings with obviously gay and lesbian models – naked, in leather gear, transvestites, HIV-positive, etc...”
― Ludwig Qvarnström, Swedish Art History : A Selection of Introductory Texts

“Still, no one much celebrated having found a previously unknown painter [Marie Denise Villers] who was equal to the great David. Though the public continued to love the painting - they may not have known David from Delacroix, at any rate - soma academics had a change of heart about the painting itself.

Sterling (see start of chapter) said some not-very nice things, beginning with, "The notion that our portrait may have been painted by a woman is, let us confess, an attractive idea." Why attractive? Because it explains everything wrong with the work: "cleverly concealed weaknesses" and "a thousand subtle artifices" that all add up to "the feminine spirit."

In other words: Isn't that just like a woman?”
― Bridget Quinn, Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History

“[..]You know the problem with connoisseurship?"

I did not. I had no idea there was a problem with connoisseurship.

"It doesn't take into account the artist waking up on the wrong side of the bed. [..] It doesn't consider the really shitty day"

[..] Later it would occur to me, what about the opposite? The Day When Everything Goes Right. The Fucking Excellent Day.”
― Bridget Quinn, Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History

“This simple fact of sculpture making is as true today (Jeff Koons, anyone?) as it was in the nineteenth century. But critics of the Marmorean Flock used it to raise the ageless trope against women artist: they are not the authors of their own works. Marmorean Flock member Harriet Hosmer railed against such spiteful ignorance: "We women-artists have no objection to its being known that we employ assistants; we merely object to its being supposed that it is a system peculiar to ourselves." Nearly all sculptors of the time used stonecutters and other artisans in executing their works.

Except, not Lewis. She famously wielded the chisel herself. Early on she probably couldn't afford assistants, but she no doubt continued because as a woman of color she could not afford any hint of fraud.”
― Bridget Quinn, Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History

“[..] And here, suddenly, was Woolf's own talented sister. The one who survived. The sister who painted.

My first thought was: how sad. What fate could be worse than to be in close proximity to genius, capable of recognizing it, but, alas, something less-than? And Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell must have been less-than, because I'd barely heard of her. How terrible, and sadly typical, that in my long pursuit of women artists I'd apparently learned nothing. Least of all, that they are all too easily lost to time, a condition rarely any reflection on their talent.”
― Bridget Quinn, Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History

“At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.”
― Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work

“Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.

It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom—then powerless to aid Him—He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.

In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“Ah… Yeah, it’s weird… We tell people to follow their dreams and when they do we call them losers for not being employable! Because they studied poetry and art history instead of engineering and medicine. We live in a terrible society!”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“Same-sex love has often been relegated to the margins of art as problematic (and preferably tragic).”
― R. B. Parkinson

“Same-sex love has often been relegated to the margins of art as problematic (and preferably tragic).”
― R.B. Parkinson, A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Around the World