Robert Henri Quotes

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

The desire to please is maligned, unfairly. There are many sides to it. First of all, pictures have to arouse interest before people will even look at them, and then they have to show something that holds that interst - and naturally they have to be presentable, just as a song has to be sung well, otherwise people run away. One mustn't underrate this quality, and I have always been delighted when my pieces have also appealed to the museum guards, the laymen.

A good painting should be the equivalent of a good deed.

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

As an artist, I want a reaction.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.