Robert Henri Quotes

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

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.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.

I love my relationship with Coach Vermeil because it is one of the few genuine relationships that I have.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

Only photograph what you love.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

No, I only like whether I like the story or not, essentially see something in it that isn't completely there.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

Feel the rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything.

I think it's difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.