1,307 Quotes About Artists

She ended her talk, once again showing both the Bigelow Cassatt and the Raphael Granduca Madonna. “By transforming Helen, first into a mother and then into the Madonna model,” she concluded, “Cassatt captured the religious belief system of the Renaissance in an Impressionist context. Her work shows that the living bond between every mother and child is no less than Mary’s with the infant Jesus. Unconditional human love is holy.

Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to wither.

We create forms, like a second order of nature, we arrest youth, retain a glance which in "nature" would have changed or vanished a moment later, we seize and separate lightning movements which no one would ever have seen and we leave them, with all their mysterious meaning, to the eyes of future generations.

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like “all power to the imagination” expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’tcapable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fightagainst the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.

The worst thing an artist can have is too much freedom.

Women born works of art, men doomed to spend entire lifetimes trying to create just one.

Our great artists battle on a landscape we cannot chart, with weapons we do not comprehend, against adversaries we find unreal.

I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.