Art History Quotes

• 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

  Art, Growing Up, California

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

  Robert Smithson

  Art, Faster, Explosives

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.41, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Art, Training, Study

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• 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

  Family, Mother, Appreciation

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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

  Art, Class, Chinese

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

  David Salle

  Art, Fall, Bed

  Interview with David Salle, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 9, 2013.

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• Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Art, Creativity, Drawing

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• 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

  Art, Book, Thinking

  "In-depth Written Interview". TeachingBooks Interview, www.teachingbooks.net. September 7, 2010.

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• History paints the human heart.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Heart, History, Paint

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• Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves -- or desires.

  Jacquetta Hawkes

  Age, Desire, Stonehenge

  "God in the Machine". "Antiquity", Volume 41, Issue 163, p. 174, September 1967.

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

  Jeff Koons

  Art, Different, More Time

  Interview with David Colman, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

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• Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

  Johan Huizinga

  Art, History, Historical

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

  Robert Longo

  Art, Long, Lasts

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

  Phyllis McGinley

  Art, Taken, History

  Phyllis McGinley, Gerald Durrell (1969). “Birds, beasts, and relatives”, Viking Adult

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• 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

  Art, Thinking, Important

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.3, Routledge

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• I think that an obsession with art history gave rise to the work.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Thinking, Obsession

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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

  Margaret Atwood

  Art, Light, Shining

  Margaret Atwood (2012). “Surfacing”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.

  Patrick Swift

  Art, Opposites, Interesting

  "Official Art and the Modern Painter". "X, A Quarterly Review" Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1, November 1959.

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• This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Hurt, Heart, History

  Address Upon Taking the Oath of the U.S. Presidency, delivered 9 August 1974 East Room of the White House, Washington, D.C.

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• PICARD: There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy. WESLEY: But William James won't be in my Starfleet exams. PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship. WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy PICARD: It takes more. Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something.

  Gene Roddenberry

  Art, Philosophy, Mean

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• What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.

  Abbas Kiarostami

  Art, Book, Years

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• People say graphic design is so different now, because you have so many more pixels and colors to work with... But when you study art history, you see there's just nothing new under the sun. Mosaics and needlework, it's all analogous to pixel and bitmap art. And with it all, good design's not about what medium you're working in, it's about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.

  Susan Kare

  Art, Thinking, People

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• There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Character, Heart, Men

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• 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

  Running, Art, Sex

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Photography, Art, Sound

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