August Wilhelm von Schlegel Quotes

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art needs to stand for something.

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

It is to aid in making the arts operative rather than only positively or negatively pleasurable... it is to paint a record, in so far as I am increasingly capable, of man's deepst capacities... I seek to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'idea.

Art is the expression of a man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to the universe's unspoken message.

The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

What I do as an art form is try to make people feel good and if I do try to make them feel bad, it's for a reason. There's something I am trying to say.

My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.

Only art means anything.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

Art is about trying to find the good in people, and making the world a more compassionate place.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

There is no art without intention.

Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.

The aim of art is to create space.

I have always been aware of different movements and directions in art. But, in general, I'm always bored by any kind of generalization when it comes to artists. I think that there are just single individuals, who are valuable, and they work outside of any group.

I am not a representative of anything. When art historians or critics or the public put somebody in a drawer like this, it has a tranquilizing, paralyzing effect. Artists are individuals. They have ideas, and the conventions for one's self as an individual are not for a group. There are always those who follow the group, but they belong in the margins. I refuse to be placed within, or added to, one particular school.