American Art Quotes

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.

The music that I first fell in love with was American music, really. Nothing against British acts - I love them and will forever - but on the whole, it was the art of American storytelling in the kind of folk and blues lyrics that, if you scratch a little bit, there's a heartbreaking story there.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.

I paint the American scene.

At some future time I shall see New York the artist's ground. I think you will create an American School.

Growing up in a traditional environment, I was taught the importance of art, how it's connected to the soul, how it makes a human being. This made me understand and cherish American art forms.

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.

I think multicamera comedy is a much-maligned American art form.

Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

I like '50s and '60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

A great writer named Neal Stephenson said that America does four things better than any other country in the world: rock music, movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery. All of these are sacred American art forms. Let's return to our purity and our idealism while we have this shot.

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

I absolutely love American folk art, can't get enough of it.

In the '50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.

Norman Rockwell - even though we think of him as a great American artist, in a lot of museums he has not garnered that kind of attention. And it's this kind of accessibility that we're trying to bring - not looking down on any art.

There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.