Robert Henri Quotes

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

There's no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it's just a bit of - it's just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We're all art, art is just a tag, like a journalists' tag, but artists believe it.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

Just trying to live our lives and figuring out how to turn that into art. It's tough to say that the art was premeditated. Instead you just focused on living. 'How do I want to live? What do I want to do?' Then you figured out how to make that into art.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

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.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.