Art Revolution Quotes

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.