Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

There is no reason for me to show my collection in New York, because it's not about craft and technique there.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Writing and Painting are the same for me.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.