Egon Schiele Quotes

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

I don't really believe in political art. I feel in my heart the purpose of art transcends cultural and class and politics. I think something like the Sistine Chapel is something that goes beyond just being a Christian thing. It transcends its Christianity and becomes sort of a universal beauty. And I think that's true of music and art and literature.

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow.

Music's designed to be timeless.

High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don't admire the steam locomotive anymore.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.

In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.