Anselm Kiefer Quotes

I see things like they've never been seen before. Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made.

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

Art is a tool by which society extends its perception.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of 'Vincent', I thought of his picture 'Starry Night.' It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

We look at the Mona Lisa and say we're going to do our version of the Mona Lisa. We mirror it. But exaptation would say that painting the Mona Lisa would lead to a whole new place... Bugs Bunny.

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

While painting I noticed a piece of madras cloth on the floor. As usual, my mind started working overtime and a pair of scissors and a small amount of glue later...I created THE COMEDIAN. Everybody loved the uniqueness of the painting. It was indeed a hit.

History after all is the true poetry.