Edvard Munch Quotes

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.

I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

I really believe that I am the first and only artist to throw not just the 'subject' out of my paintings, but every 'object' as well.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims - the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

As taxpayers, we have quietly accepted the fact that our taxes will be spent to pay big bucks for all sorts of ugly, twisted metal to be displayed in front of or inside government buildings, in the name of 'art' that was obviously never meant to give the public any enjoyment and often represented a thumbing of the artist's nose at the public.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

Even if someone thinks there's a mistake I've made on the piano, to me it's not a mistake; it's how it's meant to be.

I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

The filmmaker is not telling you what to think.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.