LeRoy Neiman Quotes

The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

Andy Warhol defined Pop Art.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

I find impressionists slightly annoying, really.

I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

I don't think geometric art is... I don't like to call it that. I don't think it's any more pure than pop art or anything else. It doesn't have anything to do with purity.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

Warhol had resonance because it was high art and low art. And you could argue about it endlessly.

I love art, painting, and drawing and studying art, like Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

The word 'impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted.