Painting Quotes

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

Hans Arp
There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible.

Adolph Alfred "Al" Taubman
- Challenge
- Marketing
- Beer

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Maurice Denis
- Remember
- Model
- Horse
Morris Louis and I were interested in how Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler famous for her soak-painting technique were using paint. Of necessity we had to get more interested in the stuff of painting. We talked a lot about whether to size the painting or not to size, how to mix up paint.

Kenneth Noland
- Up
- Painting
- Famous
I have appointed you his friend, the sculptor Francis Chantry one of my executors. Will you promise to see me rolled up in it in Turner's painting 'Carthage'? ('Yes', responded his friend 'and I promise you also that, as soon as you are buried, I will see you taken up and unrolled.'

J. M. W. Turner
- Up
- Friend
- Taken
In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

Amor Towles
When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

Wayne Thiebaud
- World
- Thinking
- Real
Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Harold Rosenberg
- Art
- History
- Game