Harold Rosenberg Quotes

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation, that is, to Suprematism, to the new realism in painting - to non-objective creation.

Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again.

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.

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

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

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.