Leon Battista Alberti Quotes

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine.

The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is.

A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

There is no such thing as #1 in art.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable... they give the idea of a whole.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.