"After thirty years of looking at new work in galleries and even newer work in studios, I am very familiar with the experience of being completely at a loss when confronting a new idea or image."

“The argument that new vision becomes the reference point for the future, is a line that I have been driven to use on many occasions.”

“Craft, I would argue, is not an essential part of art, though skill is. That skill may indeed find its expression in draughtsmanship or carving, realised through the hand of the artist, but it may also be directed towards the selection of material or the choice of an expert fabricator.”

“But when the artist abandons visible appearance, as in Mondrian's black grids on white grounds filled with balancing rectangles of colour, many people feel left behind. And yet the rhythms of Mondrian are those of nature. The harmonies are those which guided proportion in classical buildings and Renaissance churches. Rothko's glowing maroon Seagram Murals at the Tate may, like Turner's late canvases, appear to be "of nothing" but in their brooding depth Rothko suggests another world. As one four year old child said of the Rothko room at the Tate "it makes me think of God.”

“A visit to a studio never fails to test my resources. It constantly reminds me of the condition in which most people first confront contemporary art. This is a state of "not knowing", of "not understanding", of being disorientated or challenged by the unfamiliar. One of my responsibilities as a curator is therefore to remember that a visitor encountering an unfamiliar work of art in the museum is likely to be as unprepared as I was in the studio. But I've come to realise that it's precisely when I am most challenged in my own reactions that the deepest insights emerge.”

“For many years, and like many British people, I had little feeling for the most expressive and roughest form of early twentieth century European painting, the expressionism of German artists around the First World War like Kirchner.”

“I have never really understood the objection to art which is specifically made for a gallery or museum, and so cannot be collected by an individual or taken home. It is rather like saying that all music should be confined to the chamber work or novels to the short story.”