Artists

“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.”

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

“Man kann in Deutschland keine schöne Landschaft malen. Jedes Feld ist ein Friedhof.”

“You cannot paint a beautiful landscape in Germany. Every field is a graveyard, every forest a hiding place, every railway line a route to the camps. The landscape is contaminated — and it is this contamination that I paint.”

“A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.”

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist.”

“Pies, ¿para qué los quiero si tengo alas pa' volar?”

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time.”

“Ich verwische, um alles gleich zu machen, alles gleich wichtig und gleich unwichtig.”

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth, and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”

“All art is erotic.”

“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.”

“I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.”

“Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet.”

“The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated. Duchamp's gesture of withdrawal was aristocratic — a refusal to engage with the world. I propose the opposite: total engagement. Art must enter the street, the factory, the parliament, the school.”

“六才にして物の形状を写すの癖ありて”

“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs, but all I produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account.”

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.”

“Il più nobile piacere è la gioia di comprendere.”

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”

“Art is a guarantee of sanity.”

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

“The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing.”

“It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair.”

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

“L'art est un mensonge qui nous fait comprendre la vérité.”

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

“Die Farbe hat mich. Ich brauche nicht nach ihr zu haschen. Sie hat mich für immer. Das ist der glücklichen Stunde Sinn: ich und die Farbe sind eins. Ich bin Maler.”

“Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me for ever. That is the significance of this happy moment: colour and I are one. I am a painter.”

“Choose only one master—Nature.”

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”

“Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.”