Art Critic

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

🇫🇷Guy Debord

Philosophy

Situationist International

1931–1994

"With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning."

🇩🇪Walter Benjamin

Literature

Idealism

1892–1940

"History breaks down in images not into stories."

John Ruskin

Art

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

1819–1900

"Punishment is the last and least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime."

🇺🇸John Updike

Literature

modernist literature

1932–2009

"It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."

🇫🇷André Malraux

Literature

1901–1976

"Our civilization … is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it."

🇺🇸Bernard Berenson

Art

1865–1959

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."

Sergei Diaghilev

Business

1872–1929

"Tchaikovsky thought of committing suicide for fear of being discovered as a homosexual, but today, if you are a composer and not homosexual, you might as well put a bullet through your head."

🇫🇷Guillaume Apollinaire

Literature

1880–1918

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."

🇬🇧Paul Nash (artist)

Art

Modernism

1889–1946

"I believed that by a process of what I can only describe as inward dilation of the eyes I could increase my actual vision."

🇫🇷Théophile Gautier

Literature

Romanticism

1811–1872

"The second romantics are true seers: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de Banville. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead."

🇺🇸Elaine de Kooning

Journalism

abstract expressionism

1918–1989

"women painted women: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, and so forth. And I thought, men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as sex objects."

🇫🇷Albert Gleizes

Philosophy

Section d'Or

1881–1953

"Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City"

🇬🇧Rasheed Araeen

Art

British black arts movement

b. 1935

"Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I a non-European relate to European society I find myself living in but do not belong to? How do I react to its assumptions of white superiority?"

"Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or "dematerialized."

🇬🇧William Soutar

Literature

1898–1943

"Art is for all — and the greatest art proves it."

Denis Diderot

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1713–1784

"Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs."

🇫🇷Octave Mirbeau

Literature

Impressionism

1848–1917

"“During Humankind’s long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed."

Walter Pater

Literature

1839–1894

"It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art."

"The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work."

🇫🇷Frank Popper

Education

1918–2020

"Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished."

🇫🇷Jean Metzinger

Literature

cubism

1883–1956

"Los Angeles County Museum of Art Database, LACMA"

"This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago."

🇺🇸Frank Robinson

Literature

1845–1898

"It worked out just right. I've had to try to catch Aaron virtually all my career. But he's the home run king, so that means he's the cleanup hitter. That means I got into the Hall of Fame before he did."

🇫🇷Charles Baudelaire

Literature

Symbolism

1821–1867

"I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine."

🇫🇷Maurice Denis

Art

Pont-Aven School

1870–1943

"The profoundness of our emotions comes from the sufficiency of these lines and these colors to explain themselves.. ..everything is contained in the beauty of the work."

🇬🇧John Berger

Art

1926–2017

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."

🇺🇸Clement Greenberg

Art

Expressionism

1909–1994

"Complete honesty has nothing to do with "purity" or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart."

Umberto Boccioni

Art

Futurism

1882–1916

"While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment and thus build the table."

🇺🇸Jerry Saltz

Journalism

b. 1951

"I'm looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is actually saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive."

🇫🇷Émile Zola

Literature

Naturalism

1840–1902

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud."

"The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry."

🇫🇷Stéphane Mallarmé

Art

Surrealism

1842–1898

"Selected works of Stéphane Mallarmé in French"

🇺🇸S. S. Van Dine

Literature

1888–1939

"“Oh, my dear fellow! I’m not indulgin’ in implications. I’m merely givin’ tongue to my youthful curiosity, don’t y’ know."