Emil Nolde Quotes

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

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

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

You need the art in order to love the life.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.

I feel like when I fight it's an art, and Art isn't supposed to be 'nice', it isn't supposed to be liked. It's supposed to make you feel something.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or one of reception and enjoyment.

Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the soul.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.