Otto Dix Quotes

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.

My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

Color is a matter of taste and of sensitivity.

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

Color is an intense experience on its own.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

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

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

The distinctions of fine art bore me to death.

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.