Arnold Newman Quotes

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

I don't paint, and I can't draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real. When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.