Jackson Pollock Quotes

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.

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.

I'm a text artist. It's an unsung art form because it's so ahead of its time.

I like to break down barriers and I think that Hollywood is doing the same thing over and over. I want to do something new and say, "Let's evolve as artists!"

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

Todayart is moving in a direction of which our fathers would never even have dreamed.We stand before the new pictures as in a dream and we hear the apocalyptic horsemen in the air.

A lot of artists are involved with fabrication. Artists today are making more objects and many of them need the participation of a dealer in order to facilitate and provide support for projects. So that has changed. But I don't know if what it means to be an artist has really changed. I hope that it hasn't.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

I had a visit from an artist friend who basically said, "Your paintings are wonderful. Now stop." It did resonate with me. It hit on the percolating need for change that was already there. I got a little push. I did a group of the paintings early on that were among the best. It was sort of beginner's luck with these.

If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.

New arts destroy the old.

I want people to know about these visionary artists. I want people to know what they stand for and (that) they are representing something unique, something fresh. I am just so excited about their careers.

Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork... they will receive my new work als they always have when something new presents itself: with indignation and screams of scorn.

I don't want to just be an actor my whole life. I mean I do want to be an actor my whole life but not only an actor, I want to be an artist.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.