Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!

They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

Of course, in the art class, I was the model.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.

The artist is called a creator.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks.