The Power Of Art Quotes
"Painting isn't a beckoner – it's a grabber, a button-holer; its paintings shamelessly come out and accost us."
"Caravaggio's best moments were often counter-intuitive."
"The animal aggression; the in-your-face invasion of body space; the revelling in outrage, sexual and social; the embrace of the socially unwholesome; the shameless self-dramatization that made him come at you out of the blackness, in a bolt of violent light."
"The power of this art is a confession of the limits of all art."
"To truly believe, then, meant to press that flesh."
"The confidence to do that is all the more breathtaking in that Caravaggio was not really a painter in the Venetian manner."
"Caravaggio's art turned on his utter determination to give physical presence to what had previously been wan stereotypes."
"The source of art, as with Medusa, becomes the source of life."
"Caravaggio, who had just painted one of the most sublime outcries against cold power, was unable to arrest his own hot temper."
"He was therefore ‘expelled and thrust forth like a rotten limb’."
"But Minniti couldn’t have done much to give Caravaggio what he needed more than anything else: peace, pardon, rehabilitation."
"His only chance for salvation lay with the possibility of pardon back in Rome."
"The fact of the matter was that in Sicily he was jumpy and unsettled, and with good reason."
"The pain was so severe that it made me moan several times."
"The sweetness of this intense pain is so extreme that there is no wanting it to end, and the soul is satisfied with nothing less than God."
"The soul doesn’t try to feel the pain of being wounded by the Lord’s absence."
"Who, then, would want Caravaggio dead? More to the point, who did not want Caravaggio dead?"
"Instead there was a return to his sharpest, most brilliantly dramatic manner, yet this time without even a hint of flash."
"He had been a brute, but one capable of devout sublimity."
"To see David, pure, heroic and divine, was to see what Christian art was for: beauty as the agency of salvation."
"Nothing is as simple as it seems. There are no pure heroes, no irredeemable villains."
"‘Now I want you to speak not with men but with angels’."
"It’s magic. And that was precisely why, after his death, Bernini would be attacked by artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds for being a cheap sorcerer."
"His passion was to approximate men to gods."
"Taking breathtaking chances with risky drilling, Bernini could make marble do things it had never done before."
"Bernini’s figures break free from the gravity pull of the pedestal to run, twist, whirl, pant, scream, bark or arch themselves in spasms of intense sensation."
"But then Bernini’s whole career, his whole life, had gone against the grain."
"But we stare and stare nonetheless – as we stare at no other sculpture ever made."
"For the ruined painter, it was a gamble at the edge."
"In fact, artists in the 17th century were a lot less squeamish than their modern counterparts about the physical sanctity of their work."
"THIS IS SHOCKING because it’s hard to think of any painter who for so long had such perfect pitch for nailing exactly what it was that his fellow citizens wanted from their art."
"To Huygens, Rembrandt’s genius lay precisely in his gift for bringing together earthy nature and exalted drama."
"What Rembrandt is inventing, then, is the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life."
"If you’re a Dutch parent and you want to tell your children about why your history is special, about how your people came to be the way they are, through ordeals of war and suffering, faith and freedom, and if you want them to see the painting which, ruin though it is, begins to tell that story, you’ll have to take them to – Stockholm."
"But Rembrandt’s position in Amsterdam was anything but magisterial."
"AND THAT WAS AFTER HIS RUIN, which came gradually but inexorably."
"For any aspiring young painter, a study period in Rome was indispensable."
"What was being created in Paris was something entirely new in the art world: a public."
"But David’s version_, The Death of Seneca_, was overcrowded melodrama."
"Then David knew that – despite being a royal commission – the Horatii was both late and too big."
"It’s a vanishing point in which something, although invisible, materializes: an idea."
"The painting emits some sort of unearthly hum."
"But if he had any anxiety at all that this would be a colossal exercise in wishful thinking, that The Tennis Court Oath, with its figures all reaching towards the focal point of Bailly’s oath, some with their arms around each other, was in direct contradiction to the alarming fissures opening up every day in the body politic, he suppressed it."
"David’s painting was supposed to do just that – to make Marat-Martyre (the play on words wasn’t missed, of course) permanent as the holy icon of the Republic."
"Marie-Antoinette was secretly writing to her brother, the Austrian Emperor Leopold, imploring him to intervene, if necessary by means of an invasion, and liberate her husband and herself from their captivity to the Assembly and the ‘mob’."
"But Marat had no children, either to redeem his icon or to destroy it."
"This is a pity, since Turner saw himself first and foremost as a British patriot-painter who shared a birthday, St George’s Day, 23 April, with Shakespeare."
"But nothing truly stirred him more than the twin epics of British geography and history."
"When he could put them together – as in Dolbadern Castle – his touch for visual drama was perfect."
"Turner claimed never to be much of a theatre-goer, he could hardly avoid the perpetual carnival that was Covent Garden Piazza."
"Turner was, after all, the cockney ‘sparrer’ from London’s Maiden Lane."
"He learnt Malton’s hard-ruled lines and arithmetically precise proportions at the same time that he got a whiff of the smoke and mirrors of stage spectacle."
"His real – if indirect – tutor in the sensations of epic calamity was Philippe de Loutherbourg."
"Young Turner followed where Loutherbourg, the impresario of catastrophe, led."
"Turner, the quick and handy adolescent sketcher, could turn these out in his sleep."
"Turner began his lifelong addiction to the river, where he cast his line and hooked idylls of deep England."
"His sketches – already filling books – were good enough to give his father serious hopes."
"Turner, who had broken into the world of the Academy astonishingly early, would have to oblige propertied patrons."
"Turner was sent to a sketching ‘academy’ in Bedford Square run by a physician-cum-amateur artist, Dr Thomas Monro."
"Turner didn’t make the choreography of the crowd his principal passion."
"To tell the truth, he was a bit of a gawper himself."
"Above anything else he was a dramatist of light, the most stupendous Britain has ever produced."
"Turner’s histories are aggressively stylized."
"He was always and ever of two minds and moods: light and dark, apocalyptic and serene."
"Some who knew Turner well described him as a laughing merrymaker, enjoying romps with children."
"To sustain his occasionally faltering good cheer Turner would every so often turn inwards to the apparently untroubled heart of England."
"Although he was one of life’s perpetual probationers, Vincent couldn’t have been a complete washout as a teacher."
"If he was looking for a modern industrial hell, the Borinage, the coal-mining region of southern Belgium, was just about perfect."
"Unpaid, ill-clad and even more impoverished than the people to whom he was ministering, he hung around the village of Cuesmes, a tramping wayfarer in a landscape of sulphurous darkness."
"Artists, especially in the Netherlands, had long taken ordinary labouring people at work and play as their subject."
"Friendship was what he wanted to give, and in turn to receive, from all those to whom he poured out his heart in his letters."
"Echoing his idol Rembrandt’s etchings, van Gogh stares unflinchingly at her used body – the drooping breasts hanging on a scrawny frame."
"When you love a woman she can never be old."
"Suddenly all the feeble 19th-century reworkings of 17th-century peasant scenes seem so much slumming for the bourgeoisie."
"His ideal vision of how they should be perceived was as a wrap-around domestic environment enveloping the melancholy in a bed of sensory bliss."
"The short marks that would be his signature manner do, in fact, resemble untrimmed threads poking through the back of a knitted fabric."
"His radically original style of marks, in short bristly streaks, was unavoidably personal, aggressive and direct."
"He would, in his own way, have to be a common labourer too, someone whose nose was never far from the coalface, the loom or the soil."
"The notion that painting was nothing more than light plays, artful arrangements of colour and form, repelled him."
"The artist who wanted to capture this could not be a dandified aesthete."
"Every stroke was a letter to the beholder, wanting us to feel them as if they had been laid down just seconds before."
"The enjoyment of any beautiful thing is like coitus, a moment of infinity."
"The artist’s whole life as an artist had been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art."
"For Vincent himself, sightings of the infinite were everywhere, even in the Borinage – on a grimy face, a calloused hand, the petals of a flower struggling to bloom amidst the slag-heaps."
"The trouble was that both of the mutually incompatible Spains claimed to be the authentic nation and each had the same number of dependable votes – around 4.5 million."
"Traditionalists saw the socialists who dominated the Republican governments as anti-Christ, bent on destroying the institutions that, for them, made Spain: Church, Army, Land."
"For both sides, the salvation of the country required the annihilation of the other."
"When the left wing won, the Church and army treated the moment as if Spain itself had gone down to defeat."
"Had each side been capable of conceiving of themselves as rival parties, some form of coexistence might have been possible, but this was never the case."
"The urbane expatriate, the ultimate Parisian started to have Spanish dreams, or rather to fall prey to Spanish nightmares."
"Picasso’s idea of appealing to the universal was quite different. Instead of banishing myth and memory, the series of etchings he did in 1935, called the Vollard Suite excavated its most ancient layers."
"The immediate result was to clear obstacles for Franco’s army, which duly swept through large parts of Spain."
"The connection that Guernica makes is indeed universal: a hotline to all our fears."
"The triumph of the photographic image only compounded the problem, since the equation of the optically fixed image with reality had made us more impervious to the deeper truths of experience."
"Hence, for Rothko, the painting was never finished with the last brushstroke. That was merely the end of the beginning."
"Rothko did, in fact, sometimes cry when faced with this graduation."
"Small paintings, he said, were actually cold things because the painter was necessarily outside the image as he made it."
"Rothko’s ideal was to try to make the gallery space an approximation of the studio so that we could share with him the illusion of the painting perpetually becoming."
"If he didn’t get his way, he would throw a tantrum or pull the paintings from a show."
"The richness thus builds slowly in the eye, becoming optically inexhaustible."