Critics Quotes - Page 3

• For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

  Adam Gopnik

  Art, Writing, Talking

  "Life Studies" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

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• When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

  Kazimir Malevich

  Art, Squares, Objectivity

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• It does not astonish me that the critics in London relegate me to the lowest rank. Alas! I fear that they are only too justified!

  Camille Pissarro

  Doe, London, Justified

  Camille Pissarro, Lucien Pissarro (1943). “Camille Pissarro: letters to his son Lucien”

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• Submit your work to interested societies for exhibition where the critics in the light of their physical well-being and according to the extent of their knowledge, may appraise them conveniently.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Light, Exhibitions, May

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• The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged - not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Art, Rights, Suggestions

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• Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist - Heaven forgive them - but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Attitude, Grateful, Artist

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• When I was doing Professor Albert Einstein's bust he had many a jibe at the Nazi professors, one hundred of whom had condemned his theory of relativity in a book. 'Were I wrong,' he said, 'one professor would have been enough.

  Jacob Epstein

  Book, Nazi, Enough

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• Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Art, Needs, Looks

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• A critic without a good eye is a eunuch in a harem.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Eye, Harem, Eunuchs

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• Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion.

  Robert Genn

  Fashion, Art, Transient

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• Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest.

  Wayne Thiebaud

  Tough, Finest, Very Good

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• I hope my work isn't dismissed by the critics as illustration or photography.

  E. J. Hughes

  Photography, Illustration

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• Sometimes I'd like everybody who is stuck, or lost, or vacant to stay that way and keep silent for as long as it takes, but that's the critic in me talking.

  David Toop

  Talking, Long, Way

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• God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Attitude, Sick, People

  Ernest Hemingway (2008). “The Good Life According to Hemingway”, Ecco

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• If the function of the artist is to see, the first duty of the critic is to understand what the artist saw.

  J. E. H. MacDonald

  Artist, Saws, Firsts

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• The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Eye, Criticism, Sides

  Walter Savage Landor (1856). “Selections from the Writings of Walter Savage Landor”, p.121

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• I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments.

  James Elkins

  Artist, Achievement, Ambitious

  James Elkins (2005). “Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings”, p.6, Routledge

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• Some critics claim to know what art has to be and do, and consider it their task to steer art along the path they have chosen. Others receive art gladly, and try to distinguish degrees of excellence.

  Norbert Lynton

  Art, Excellence, Trying

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• There are many out there who proudly call themselves critics, but I have come to see that many of those critics have never tested their own skill.

  Allison Mackie

  Skills, Tested

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• It's absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy your paintings think. They just don't have any possible idea of what happens to you and they're really not that interested. As a matter of fact, they hate the idea that anything really happens to you. They want you to be a genius and that's it.

  Milton Resnick

  Hate, Thinking, Ideas

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• Somebody will be exhibiting a bunch of bananas in a gallery, and they'll get me on to talk dirty about it.

  Alexander Stoddart

  Dirty, Bananas, Gallery

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• An over-readiness to criticise or to depreciate a minister of Christ is proof of a lack of devotion to Christ.

  Henry Clay Trumbull

  Christ, Devotion, Proof

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 168), 1895.

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• To be a mere verbal critic is what no man of genius would be if he could; but to be a critic of true taste and feeling is what no man without genius could be if he would.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Feelings, Would Be

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.386

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• Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Fire, Long, House

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1873). “Prose Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, p.454

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• Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters--who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.

  Washington Irving

  Maturity, Animal, Progress

  Washington Irving (1834). “The Complete Works: With a Memoir of the Author”, p.100

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