Kurt Schwitters Quotes

My name is Kurt Schwitters... I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.

Picasso took scraps of wallpaper, and instead of using paint and a brush, he used all the existing elements which he made his artwork with.

Paint with whatever material you please - with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, painted paper, or newspapers.

Anything is good painting material once you get to know it.

I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

Much good art got made while money ruled; I like a lot of it, and hardship and poverty aren't virtues. The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists - especially emerging ones - won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

Few contemporary artists mined the space between the ordinary and the strange better than Orozco did.

I just thought it made sense to call a book 'Not Garbage,' even though the majority of it was going to be the scraps from people's studios; like newspaper clippings, weird drawings and stuff they might not necessarily show as artists.

I like to make collages - paper collages.

We don't sell technical drawings except when they are incorporated into a drawing or a collage.

Since I was a child I have always been cutting things out and gluing them together rather than drawing them.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

I don't think the critics could understand what we were doing.

The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.

Art must take reality by surprise.

I used to paint a lot of oil and now I paint more mixed-media stuff.

The more far-out artists, the better.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

I love to paint, do ceramics, photography. I got a lot of side things that I like to do.

You don't hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

I'm really into the recycling of art. That one piece of art inspires another piece of art, which inspires another piece of art. I really like that idea.