Jerry Saltz Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Museums, Years

• Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Ideas, Video

  "Great Artists Steal". nymag.com. May 10, 2009.

• These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Flesh Eating, Viruses

• Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

  Jerry Saltz

  Thinking, Artist, Style

• Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Museums, Media

• I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

  Jerry Saltz

  Years, Painting, Rage

• A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Museums, Groups

• Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.

  Jerry Saltz

  Braids, Painting, Wave

• Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Home, America

• After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.

  Jerry Saltz

  Years, Land, Gnarly

  New York Volume 43, Issues 14-21, New York Magazine Company, p. 1, 2010.

• 'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

  Jerry Saltz

  Heart, Night, Color

• Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Georgia O Keeffe, World

• Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

  Jerry Saltz

  Caves, Suave, Cave Paintings

• Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

  Jerry Saltz

  Thinking, Abstract Painting, Relief

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

• Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

  Jerry Saltz

  Stones, Philosopher, Painting

• I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Past, Negative

  "Making the Spirits Dance". nymag.com. June 5, 2011.

• I like something about George W. Bush. A lot. After spending more than a decade having almost physiological-chemical reactions anytime I saw him, getting the heebie-jeebies whenever he spoke - after being sure from the start that he was a Gremlin on the wing of America - I really like the paintings of George W. Bush.

  Jerry Saltz

  Wings, America, Saws

• Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

  Jerry Saltz

  Artist, Age, Tiny

• I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

  Jerry Saltz

  Photography, Ideas, Everyday

• It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, New York, Past

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