Quotes about Art

In my opinion, an album has a story from start to finish and has a concrete concept.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Before Turner there was no fog in London.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. and the portrait in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty. p 349

I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.