Robert Hughes Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

  Robert Hughes

  Art, Book, Loss

• Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

  Robert Hughes

  Keys, Ideas, Doubt

  Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, p.30, Knopf

• Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

  Robert Hughes

  Political, Intellectual, World

  Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, Knopf

• Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

  Robert Hughes

  Sex, Landscape Painting, Novel

• It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

  Robert Hughes

  Mean, Analysis, Painting

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