Clive Bell Quotes

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

A piece of art is a compact form of the universe.

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.

I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

The truth has no form, you know. It's not like walking around trying to actually ask for favors and to be acknowledged, it is what it is.

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.

But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete - By Truth, I mean the Universal.

Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol.

Art never expresses anything but itself.

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