Eugene Delacroix Quotes

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist's eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

It's difficult sometimes to go and see a show and enjoy it and not go and see a show and critique it.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it's a very direct connection. With visual art, when there's no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they're conveying.

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.

If all of the steps of surrender are present, then a great Rembrandt or Monet will evoke love because the artist is simply there in all his naked humanity.

What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people.