Figurative Representation Quotes

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

In a chariot of light from the region of the day, the Goddess of Liberty came. She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love, the plant she named Liberty Tree.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.

The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

In Giacometti's work, the armature has once again become the life-line of the sculpture, and also, he's brought back to sculpture a nervous sensitivity which the 'pure carving' side of sculpture can lose sight of altogether.

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

The body, in 'La Belle Noiseuse,' was the source of the artist's creativity.

Now, if the book of Genesis is an allegory, then sin is an allegory, the Fall is an allegory and the need for a Savior is an allegory - but if we are all descendants of an allegory, where does that leave us? It destroys the foundation of all Christian doctrine-it destroys the foundation of the gospel.

The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.

Each character is an allegory for every aspect of human existence.

Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.