European Art Quotes

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.

I am a lifelong Moebius geek. The European approach is perfect, the art is beautiful, and the storytelling is fantastic.

Not unless I do all these ancient and Italian or French or Baroque in the beginnning, I do German.

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.

I love the Prado in Madrid. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is also great.

We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead: for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.

Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

My wife loves Europe, but to me it's a bad day at a theme park.

I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.

Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.

Well, I love Europe and I love Europeans; when I look at my own personal travel, for most of my life, 80 percent of it has been to European countries. And that was long before I ever considered becoming an ambassador or was offered the opportunity, because I love everything about Europe. I like the culture. I like the food. I like the charm.

I adore the tapestries at the Musee de Cluny in Paris!

The audiences are really great. I really love it over there. I love Europe, period. Oh my God, all the architecture and all the history and just to the way people think and live is so different.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.

What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures.

I didn't think much about Marsden Hartley until very recently, but Gertrude Stein found him to be the best American painter in Europe at the time she was alive. I consider my tributes to him my most important works.

Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'

I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.