"The laws of the art of painting are the laws of the Creator, as to the expression, color, form, unity, harmony, height, depth, tone; when this knowledge is obtained, then we may trust our emotional nature." --Ralph Blakelock [the single most-often forged American artist , who went mad and spent most of his life in an asylum].
"The genuine, law-giving artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless, following a blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The former leads to the highest pinnacle of art, the latter to its lowest step." --Goethe, On German Architecture.
"Painting, then, is the art of imitating?"
"It is nothing else. If it were not this, it would merely
be an absurd jumble of colors thrown
together by chance. . . . Not to love painting is to despise
the kind of merit which we find among the poets, for painting,
like poetry, delights to offer us the features and actions of
heroes; it is also to have no respect for the science of proportions,
which links art with the very use
of reason." --Philostratos of Lemnos
[Why a lot of people do not like modern music:] "[W]e do have a certain amount of so called avant-garde music like our modern art which does try to shock and be original for originality's sake. . . [W]hat happened to beauty, the kind of beauty we associate with Mozart and Tchaikovsky? Have modern composers forgotten beauty? Where are we? We are adrift in a sea of indefinite tonality. You see these twelve musical tones have now begun to acquire an almost equal importance. They are living in a democratic anarchy, instead of an organized society governed by one definite tonic note, as had always been the case with Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. And so the legacy that Wagner left the world has been one of general pandemonium. . . . [T]he conductor is a kind of sculptor whose element is time instead of marble. --Leonard Bernstein.
"The hearing of some music became for him, as he said, 'almost the only reasonable form of worship.'" --A.C. Bradley, Philosophical Remains of Richard Lewis Nettleship.
"Parrhasios painted the Demos of Athens in a very ingenious personification. He showed it, in effect, as fickle, choleric, unjust, volatile and at the same time easily moved, merciful, compassionate, glorious, lofty, humble, bold and faint-hearted, in a word everything at once." --Pliny
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide in loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
--William Butler Yeats
"Some important truths are too
subtle even to be uttered in words. A Japanese, by arranging
a few flowers in a vase, or Rembrandt, by drawing a dark room
with an old man sitting in it, can convey meanings which no one
could ever utter in speech. . . A trunk of a tree would be rendered
with three or four rapid strokes of the brush dwindling away
into thin streaks of ink or color, making no effort to sustain
the illusion that the tree was real. The Japanese like that.
They enjoy it as we enjoy our Impressionist painters. They admire
the quality of play, almost
magic, in it: the little miracle by which an artist, with a few
blobs of color or a few dashes of black, conjures up a pool of
water or a clump of bamboo, and then simply by not trying to
be complete and literal-reminds us that art is not reproduction
but vision, and induces us to complete the picture by our own
imagination." --Gilbert Highet
"Did I ever tell you of Corot the painter that I heard once that he began as a most careful draughtsman, working out every detail, and came to his magisterial summaries at the end? I have thought of that in writing opinions latterly. Whether the brethren like it I don't know. Of course the eternal effort in art, even of the art of writing legal decisions, is to omit all but the essentials-'the point of contact' is the formula, the place where the boy got his fingers pinched.' The rest of the machinery doesn't matter. So the Japanese Master puts five dots for a hand, knowing they are in the right place and the etcher elaborates what he wants you to see and leads up to it with a few scrawls." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes letter to Frankfurter Dec. 19, 1915, in Holmes and Frankfurter-Their Correspondence.
"In art, everything which is not
essential is harmful." -- Carolus
Duran [teacher to artist John Singer Sargent]
"Only after years of contemplation of Nature can the process of selection become so sure an instinct; and a handling so spontaneous and free from the commonplaces of expression is final mastery, the result of long artistic training." --John Singer Sargent
"Speude bradeos" ["Make haste slowly"] Suetonius records this was a favorite expression of Augustus.
"[Whistler's] method , as I observed it, was first of all to arrange his subject with infinite pains and care, so that every detail was to his liking, and to paint it with infinite touches and retouches; and then, when it seemed finished and perfect in execution, to stand back, gaze at it, and cry "Ha!" and rush at it in a kind of fury and paint the whole thing out. It was like an actor rehearsing the same part over and over again until he gets it perfect; the final performance, which may take a minute, has been preceded by many hours of rehearsal." Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years
"[Apelles] says that all Protogenos' qualitities were equal or even superior to his own, but that he scored on one point: he knew when to withhold his hand from a picture. By this memorable lesson he intended to say that working with excessive minuteness is often damaging." --Pliny
"If one paints in a confused way, even with the most beautiful colors, it will not give as much pleasure as a picture painted simply in white . . . . The best copyist will bear away the crown only if he makes it his aim to paint that which is most beautiful . . . Here is a way to give colours their value: it consists in making them shine through their relation to one another, as painters sometimes do, placing another tint over one more vivid. . . [and a painting should strive for balance]; hence the common remark about a perfect work of art, that you could not take from it nor add to it--meaning that excess and deficiency destroy perfection, while adherence to the mean preserves it." --Aristotle
"The trouble is to find the juste
milieu between slouchiness
and too much exactness of form to make a suggestive picture rather
than a positively realistic one." --[artist] Benjamin
Champney
In 1905 the American muralist Kenyon Cox retold an anecdote of the time Sargent had painted a portrait in which he was thought to have brought out the inner nature of his sitter, and to have seen through the veil of the external man. When asked about it, Sargent expressed some annoyance at the idea and remarked: 'If there were a veil, I should paint the veil. I can paint only what I see.'" Carter Ratliff, ed., John Singer Sargent
"You should mention 'realism.' That, I think, is a term which has to be defined: realism should never be the end in view. My theory is that you should use all the objects in nature, trees, hills, skies, rivers and all, just as stage properties on which to hang your idea, the end in view, the elusive quality of a day, in fact all the qualities that give a body the delights out of doors. You cannot sit down and paint such things: they are not there, or do not last but for a moment. Realism of expression, the MOOD of the moment, yes, but not the realism of THINGS. The colored photograph can do that better. That is the trouble with so much art today, it is factual, and stops right there." Maxfield Parish letter to Jerome Connally, May 5, 1952
" . . . painters of horticulture like Hall exhaust their
art on the outside of things, with the fidelity of workers in
wax. The more natural, the greater the lie, because they try
not for a type of suggestion, but for an actual depiction. An
untrained eye may be deceived, but such success is a positive
condemnation. Art has fallen to 
the lowest condition of artifice.
Sooner or later, the mind detects the subterfuge, outgrows its
juvenile liking, and
the sham becomes to it stale and wearisome. Who thinks of the
science of the horticulturalist, or pauses to taste, weigh or
price flowers and fruit painted as John La Farge paints them?
His violets and lilies are as tender and true suggestions of
flowers not copies as nature ever grow, and affect our senses
in the same delightful way." --James Jackson Jarves,
The Art Idea
"[About friezes at Delos] The high polish of the background surface is a vital factor in the [white monochrome] technique, for it provides a glass-like smoothness over which the brush can glide with wonderful freedom and swiftness. On such a surface of polished dark, given the characteristically transparent nature of liquid white of a certain milky consistency, every slightest variation in the movement of the hand is captured, every change in the pressure of the touch is clearly registered and made distinct. There is no overpainting, no clumsiness, everything is made lifelike and distinct in a few simple, seemingly uncomplicated strokes . . . which can only succeed if they remain unlabored. The whole aim of the technique seems to be to attain the quality described in the Rennaissance as sprezatura, a term coined by Castiglione in his text book for courtly behavior . . . as standing for the quality of ease and effortlessnesss of manner ideally to be shown in all human activity." --Vincent J. Bruno, Hellenistic Painting Techniques: The Evidence of the Delos Fragments
"By the late Nineteenth Century much landscape and figure painting had become mere mechanical reproduction . . . This was boring hack-work. The rise of photography made it unnecessary. Therefore the true artists started to do something else, which would be less like paid imitation of life and more like playing. . . . Duchamp ended with desperate attempts to create an anti-art which could not be appreciated unless the viewer threw away all the standards derived from the great sculpture and painting of two millennia, and contented himself with admiring one man's fairly ingenious tricks. Such people come at the end of an art which has been overblown and elevated into a religion, as by Wagner and Scriabin. Their function is to make it brittle, to undermine it, to try to loosen the links which connect it with traditional standards of aesthetics, even of morality. They are also trying to make it less of a transcendental experience and more part of the life of every day . . ." --Gilbert Highet
"Brumidi was trained in a variety of disciplines at the Academia di San Luca; his son described him as 'artist, sculptor, architect.' Brumidi himself described to a reporter his thorough academic training: 'in Europe one studies as one does not study in America,' with an eloquent Italian shrug that disposed of American art-training. 'I studied fourteen years. I worked at Rome. In the great schools a boy begins young; he has great works to copy. He works all day an every day. It is the right way.'" from Barbara Wolanin, ed., Constantino Brumidi, Artist of the Capitol
"Up until
the eighteenth century painters were also craftsmen in the full
sense of the word. They prepared their own canvases or panels,
they ground their own colors, and they respected the 
essential rules
of painting technique. The works they created are as a rule excellently
preserved . . . The pupils of David (i.e. Ingres, Gros, Girodet,
etc.) ushered in a new era of imperfect craftsmanship and reduced
technique that had disastrous consequences as far as the preservation
of their works was concerned. . . [W]ith the second half of the
nineteenth century and the Impressionists . . . painters started
to become careless in their choice of materials. . . .[T]he resultant
works are fragile to say the least. The Impressionists were the
initiators of a systematic break with the craft tradition in
painting and they found many followers. . . Nowadays
painters go as far as to flout every technical constraint."
Emile-Male, The Restorers Handbook of Easel Painting
"Technical and individual adventurism abounded, and as usual some innovations proved longer-lived than others. Delacroix once even experimented with powdered mummified bodies. As a ground for painting this produced a deep rich brown base of extremely mortal frailty . . . The butterflies have had their day, and few are worth putting in glass cases. Already in the nineteenth century Baudelaire had foreseen the problem when he spoke of the 'chaos of an exhausting and sterile freedom,' and warned against the danger of abandoning the discipline inherent in evolved schools of painting." Sarah Walden, The Ravished Image.
"It is not possible for the artist to reproduce his visual impression in its entirety, nor is it his aim to do so. On the contrary, he must try to interpret nature by showing the distinguishing characteristics of the forms he sees . . . . Generally speaking, today in the academies, no one any longer really teaches either drawing or painting. The beginner is confronted with nature and simply told to 'do what he sees.' What a paradox," wrote Paul Valéry, 'that in an age when life itself is subjected to exact determination by means of minute calculations--when science and industry require the employment of the most delicate instruments, that the observance of similar precautions, in the technique of the arts, should suffer such laxity and seem to delight in the play of incompetence and in the recklessness of facility.' Painting has ceased, in many instances to be capable of interpretation by itself alone and learned catalogues of propaganda must now accompany it to explain the intentions of the artist to the public. The theories of the conservatives are equally as sterile as those of the innovators. The truth which could put them all in accord, would consist primarily in giving to painters the technical means of executing a real piece of painting. And toward this aim, the present volume is solely dedicated. In following these reconstructed formulas of the masters, it should be possible for painter once more to attain their ends and for the greatest traditions to be renewed. The museums need no longer be cemeteries for the works of the past." Jacques Maroger, The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters
"The Medici Pope Leo X appointed a general superintendent of antiquities for the city of Rome who produced a plan for excavating the innumerable hidden treasures that lay beneath the gardens, cottages, and ruins. His name was Raphael." Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition
"I went across the river
[Seine] the other day to see an exhibition of a new school which
call themselves 'Impressionists.' I never in my life saw more
horrible things. I understand they are mostly all rich, which
accounts for so much talk. They do not observe drawing nor form
but give 
you
an impression of what they call Nature.
It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors. I was there about a
quarter of an hour and left with a headache, but I told the man
exactly what I thought. One franc entrée. I was mad for
two or three days, not only having payed the money but for the
demoralizing effect it must have on many."--artist J.
Alden Wier letter to his parents May 1, 1877 [on
the Impressonism Third Exhibition in 1877.]
"Thomas Hovenden even twenty years after the first Impressionist exhibition could still not abide the movement, which by then had been superceded in France by things he could not even imagine in Philadelphia. Harrison Morris, who became head of the Pennsylvania Academy operations in 1892 wrote: 'I recollect how he hated the intruding elements of Impressionism. He said he could do that sort of thing overnight and he did. He confided in me that he was going to paint a canvas, and put it before the jury without his name. I was to receive it at the Academy and run it through the ordeal. It all came off as planned, and he deeply enjoyed the joke on his fellow jurors who were more yielding toward the new fad when they accepted and hung the canvas.'" --David Sellin, Americans in Brittany and Normandy
"Another symbolic sunset is that of the
'Fighting 'Temeraire' tugged to her
last berth to be broken up, a picture shown in 1839."
Andrew Wilton, J. M. W. Turner, His Art and Life
"And so we come to America, for the future of fresco and, I believe, of painting in general lies here. I have lived for a large part of my life in Europe and have great admiration for the modern painting of Europe. It has an honesty, a directness, and a comprehension of form which can be compared without exaggeration to the great work of the past. But it prides itself on technical ignorance and despises any decorative utility. This unfortunate tendency comes from the fact that there is really practically no monumental work to be done and the artist has been forced into an attitude, not unlike the traditional one of 'sour grapes,' of believing that the smaller and more useless, decoratively speaking, his pictures, the more significant they must be. Before the work of the best man in Paris today, I have a feeling that I am seeing fragments, often magnificently painted, but details, sketches for some large conception which is never to be carried out." Gardner Hale, Fresco Painting
"Shoving the frontispiece of the Parthenon on to a private house-- what an idea! And what a responsibility! From here to Venice and to Palladio, to the English school so influenced by Palladio and then to America by the late Eighteenth Century. To the front of a Rolls-Royce in this century, and various jokey quotes in the post-modern idiom more or less yesterday. Porches and parliaments, the bridges of Newfoundland fishing-boats, the stoops of clapboard houses on the US east coast, and ornate mansions in the deep south." --Matthew Spender, Within Tuscany-Reflections on a Time and Place
[The architecture of the Greeks and Romans] ". . . springs from quite another principle. If these, living under a more favorable sky, allowed their roof to rest upon columns, a wall, broken through, arose of its own accord. We, however, who must always protect ourselves against the weather, and everywhere surround ourselves with walls, have to revere the genius who discovered the means of endowing massive walls with variety, of apparently breaking them through, and of thus occupying the eye in a worthy and pleasing manner on a broad surface." --Goethe, On German Architecture.
"I have found a paper of mine among some others, in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music." Conversations of Goethe
"I think I omitted perhaps the most important fact that makes the civilization of the old world superior to ours-that there they learn history and even aesthetics through their eyes as they walk the streets. They get them from infancy and all the time." Justice Holmes letter to Frankfurter, February 9, 1922.
"I wonder [American] criminals don't plead the ugliness of your cities as an excuse for their crimes." Oscar Wilde.
"I
had barely time to notice the indirect lighting, and on the wall
opposite me, a little picture in a modest frame: Dürer's
The Violets. Then our guide opened a door and ushered
us into a very large room . . . . What a strange sensation it
is for a soldier to find himself suddenly in front of his commander-in-chief.
Advancing with measured step, Adolph
Hitler saluted us by raising his arm, his hand bent forward
in that characteristic attitude we all knew so well from photographs
. . . " Otto Skorzeny, Secret Missions [Hitler
hand-picked Skorzeny to lead the commandos who, in September
1943, crash-landed gliders on a mountainside in the Italian Alps
and rescued Mussolini from carabinieri holding him captive.
In ordering the mission Hitler called Mussolini "the personification
of the last of the Roman Ceasers." ]
"Interest in Mount Desert [Island] among the metropolitan upper class in the Northeast resulted from the work of New York landscape painters . . . . In 1886 [historian]W.B. Lapham stated that artists 'F.E. Church and others. . . attacted by its marvelous scenery, has remained here for the purpose of transferring some of its marvelous views to canvas . . soon made the locality familiar to the residents of the large cities . . . [which] 'was the beginning of Bar Harbor as a seaside resort.' . . The 1960's produced a new type of middle-class vacationer whose mobility radically changed Mount Desert . . .Today, the places Cole, Church, Lane and Gifford explored, and the views they painted in the 1850s and 1860s are mechanically converted into the commodity of photographic postcards. Their very presence would not be possible without the Mount Desert that 19th Century artists invented." Pamela J. Belanger, Inventing Arcadia: Artists and Tourist at Mount Desert
"The cultural work of the explorer-painters was always performed in the name of art and science, for public good, not for private gain. The appearance of such disinterestedness by landscape painters essentially masked art's service to other agendas. Yet this disinterestedness was an illusion, because, for example, Thomas Moran could not have traveled to Yellowstone without financial backing from Jay Gould's Northern Pacific Railway." J. Gray Sweeney
"We are entertainers: we who paint pictures, or tell stories, or enact history. And, if we amuse you, you pay us well; and if we fail, you seek elsewhere diversion." Alex Waugh, Myself When Young
"The Catskills had been laid to waste. Generations of loggers, leather tanners and farmers had stripped the valleys and hilltops of their trees. Streams were clotted with the debris of a dying forest. And the mournful painting of the wreckage that Sanford Robinson Gifford produced here just after the Civil War, called 'Hunter Mountain, Twilight,' became the woodland's elegy. . . . James was very much affected by what these painters were trying to do,' said Nancy P. Pinchot, who married James's great-grandson Peter Pinchot and is now writing a book about the family. 'They were trying to capture something that was going to be lost - he took what they were saying and turned it into policy.' Gifford Pinchot and 'Hunter Mountain, Twilight' were made for each other. He was named for the artist, and born the same year, 1865, in which Sanford Gifford first sketched the scene that became the basis of the painting. His father, James, whose family had made its fortune in the lumber business, was an avid art collector, who became - through his friendship with a circle of Hudson River School painters, including Sanford Gifford - a passionate conservationist . . . .James Pinchot helped found Yale University's School of Forestry. He joined the conservation leagues that were springing up. He persuaded his son Gifford to go into forestry in the 1880's, at a time when such an occupation - particularly for a young man of independent means - was almost unheard of. And of course, he bought the painting that had inspired him, 'Hunter Mountain, Twilight.' --Kirk Johnson, Hunter Mountain Paintings Spurred Recovery of Land, New York Times, June 7, 2001.
[William
Merritt Chase maintained]: "Originality
is found in the greatest composite which you can bring together,'
adding, 'be in an absorbent frame of mind. Take the best from
everything.' He cited John Singer Sargent as a perfect example
of an artist who had done so." --Pisano, William
Merritt Chase, A Leading Spirit in American Art
"[T]he best evidence of the evanescence of taste lies in the history of forgeries. Looking back at the extraordinary episode of the Vermeers counterfeited by van Meegren, it is almost impossible for us to understand how the international experts of the time could be taken in. . . . seen from today, his forgeries bear the heavy imprint of their own times, reproducing aspects of Vermeer which appealed to the aesthetic preconceptions of the [1930's and 40's]. Looked at from our vantage point some of the faces bear undeniable similarities to Marlene Dietrich. If any further proof were needed of swings of fashion in art, it is sufficient to add that the Portrait of a Girl by Vermeer in the Hague was sold--as a Vermeer for two florins in Amsterdam in the nineteenth century." Sarah Walden, The Ravished Image
"As Van Meegeren said at his 1947 trial for forgery about a Vermeer he had faked: 'Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?'" [quoted by] Peter Landesman, The Art Con of the Century in New York Times Magazine
"Q: If technology continues to improve and the image is virtually 100 percent, what remains to keep the original , original?
De Montebello: The notion of authenticity. Take a Rembrandt like 'The Man With the Golden Helmet' in Berlin, which everybody admired but which is no longer attributed to Rembrandt. The picture hasn't changed. It was beautiful before. Why isn't it beautiful now? The answer is simple: you've changed. The day before, you were admiring something painted by Rembrandt. The moment you know its not painted by Rembrandt, you changed toward it. And so [for you] the picture does change. . . .
Q: Are you fighting commercialism, with the gift shops right next to the entrance?
De Montebello: This is a question of aura. People who make the conscious decision to visit a museum, do not want a promulgation of their daily existence. They want something different, conceivably uplifting, or at least challenging, and therefore there has to be a kind of caesura. Shops support the institution, but I certainly wouldn't put them first. I think that would defeat the impression of awe and wonder that museums should provide." New York Times interview with Phillippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"Disdained by the savage, or scattered by the soldier, dishonored by the voluptuary, or forbidden by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now, been extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection." John Ruskin
". . . having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to H.L. Mencken April 23, 1934.
"The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard; but if he will apply himself to learn from the objects of nature he will produce good results. This we see was the case with the painters who came after the time of the Romans, for they continually imitated each other, and from age to age their art steadily declined." --Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks
"In any [Rembrandt] pair portrait of this period, the man is always seen to the left of his wife (or on her right hand). He is dexterous, a-droit, rechts, all terms that semantically equate right-handedness with the law, for the husband was indeed the supreme magistrate in the little commonwealth of the family."--Simon Schama, Rembrandt's Eyes.
"The quarrel then begun still goes on, and sympathies are divided between the artificial/natural and the frankly conventional. The time has come, however, when it is recognized that both these manners are manners, the one as artificial as the other, and each to be judged, not by any ethical standard of 'sincerity' but on its own aesthetic merits. . . . It was by such means that the villa-architects obtained, with simple methods and limited space, impressions of distance, and sensations of the unsuspected, for which one looks in vain in the haphazard and slipshod designs of today." --Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Gardens [illustated by Maxfield Parrish.]
"When [Michelangelo] was informed that Paul IV desired he should paint again the side of the chapel where the Last Judgment was painted because of the indecorous nudity of the figures he replied, 'tell the Pope this is easily done. Let him reform the world and he will find the pictures reform themselves.' He saw clearly that if the corrupt and low eyes that could see nothing but indecorum in his terrific prophets and angels could be purified as his own were pure, they would only find occasion for devotion in the same figures." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel Angelo Buonarti.
'No,' replied Michael, 'it is nothing; for if Life pleases us Death being a work of the same Master ought not to displease us.'. . . [O]ne of the last drawings in his portfolio is a sublime hint of his own feelings, for it is a sketch by him of an old man with a long beard . . . and an hourglass before him and the motto 'ancora inparo' [sic], 'I still learn.'" --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel Angelo Buonarti
When the oldest colors have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it--lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair.
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money; and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as they are!
--Rudyard Kipling
