Artur Schnabel Quotes

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

It's too easy to say that orange is happy and black is sad. To me, black is perfect. You can fill it with the emotion you want to express.

I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation.

Painters hate having to explain what their work is about. They always say, 'It's whatever you want it to be' - because I think that's their intention, to connect with each person's subconscious, and not to try and dictate.

What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.

I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

The key to good art is to make something that means something to you.

I want to do things or write things that make people feel a bit more beautiful or tragic or something because there are so many other things than just funny.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

There's a part of me that wants to let all the different moments of 'Wild World' to have their moment and be released properly.

All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.

The artist’s aim is not to instruct the viewer, but to give information, whether the viewer understands the information is incidental to the artist.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.

The only thing an artist is useful for, and the only reason why we don't just line 'em up against the wall and shoot them, is because, at their best, they're the reflection of our lives, that most regular people can't even afford to think about.

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

Music is the perfect type of art.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

The aim of the painting is that the eye should find out what it likes.

The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.