Jack Levine Quotes

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them.

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

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

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

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

Great architects like Taut, Mendelsohn, and Gropius built some astonishing buildings which were to change the way architects around the world thought. Brecht and Weill forever changed musical theatre; Kaethe Kollwitz and others changed German perceptions of the purposes of art.

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

I just feel like I'm an artist that still has set a standard for artists that come up to follow and be like...So, yeah, I guess I'm a legend somewhat, I guess in my own right, but I still got a long ways to go.

I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

Successful artists don't follow trends; they create them.

Once avant-garde artists receive official recognition, they start a double life. In one, they inspire younger artists to do more. In the other, they inspire a mass of imitators who make the work respectable and exclusionary. The artists and their art become intellectual brand names.

Greedo is one of the most important California artists of our generation.

I'm hoping that Abu Dhabi's first piece of street art will inspire the next generation of artists the same way that the discovery of subway art inspired me all those years ago.

Many say that no real avant-garde - which I'll define as a combative group of free-thinking artists - can exist anymore. The media's reach is too vast. New artists and movements get snatched up too quickly.