Art × Nature

Art and Nature

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under art with "nature" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Art with "nature" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Art and Nature; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Agnes Martin, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "As an artistic triumph in psychological corruption ... the Gospels, in fact, stand alone ... Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in min…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appe…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Art quotes or the concept page for Nature.

30 Quotes on Art and Nature

"As an artistic triumph in psychological corruption ... the Gospels, in fact, stand alone ... Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal "holiness" unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art — all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement."

— Bertrand Russell

"Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex: for it is with this drive that all its beauty is bound up. More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please. This comes from the fact that they are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything whatever, and the reason for this is, I think, as follows. Man strives in everything for a direct domination over things, either by comprehending or by subduing them. But woman is everywhere and always relegated to a merely indirect domination, which is achieved by means of man, who is consequently the only thing she has to dominate directly. Thus it lies in the nature of women to regard everything simply as a means of capturing a man, and their interest in anything else is only simulated, is no more than a detour, i.e. amounts to coquetry and mimicry."

— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this.. ..that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature, an experience of simple joy.. .My paintings are about merging, about formlessness.. .A world without objects, without interruption."

— Agnes Martin

"I am primarily painting from photographs these days , in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product , I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject , it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo."

— Gerhard Richter

"I invent nothing, I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art ; they take that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I think ; I like certain symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks ; I try to put myself in the spiritual State of the men who hâve left us the antique statues. The 'Ecole' copies their works ; the thing that signifies is to recover their method. I began by showing close studies from nature like The Age of Brass. Afterwards I came to understand that art required a little more largeness, a little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from the time of the Burghers, was to find a method of exaggerating logically : that method consists in the deliberate amplification of the modelling. It consists also in the constant reduction of the figure to a geometrical figure, and in the determination to sacrifice any part of a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the Gothic sculptors did. Look at the cathedra! of Chartres ; one of the towers is massive and without ornament : they sacrificed it to give value to the exquisite delicacy of the other tower."

— Auguste Rodin

"The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature — translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive."

— Hans Hofmann

"Shall we say, for example, that Science and Art are indebted principally to the founders of Schools and Universities? Did not Science originate rather, and gain advancement, in the obscure closets of the Roger Bacons, Keplers, Newtons; in the workshops of the Fausts and the Watts; wherever, and in what guise soever Nature, from the first times downwards, had sent a gifted spirit upon the earth? Again, were Homer and Shakspeare members of any beneficed guild, or made Poets by means of it? Were Painting and Sculpture created by forethought, brought into the world by institutions for that end? No; Science and Art have, from first to last, been the free gift of Nature; an unsolicited, unexpected gift; often even a fatal one."

— Thomas Carlyle

"Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein, overjoyed, told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still life!! ."

— Pablo Picasso

"In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence."

— Robert Louis Stevenson

"My paintings are always images of my whole psychic makeup. You cannot deny yourself. You ask, am I painting myself? I'd been a swindler if I did otherwise. I'd be denying my existence as an artist. I've been also asked, what do you want to convey? And I say, nothing but my own nature.. .I am nothing but an optimist."

— Hans Hofmann

"If the question, 'What has art become?', is synonymous with 'What are the reasons for the unbrotherliness between people and for the rift in the relations beween nature and people?' then the question, 'What should art be?' is the same as the problem of establishing brotherly unity in order to transform the blind force of nature into a force guided by the reasoning powers of all the resurrected generations. In other words, what we are talking about is universal resurrection, since it is this that represents the complete restoration of kinship and that will provide art with the appropriate course to follow, and show it its goal. Transforming all the worlds into worlds guided by the reasoning powers of resurrected generations will constitute a complete resolution of the Copernican question and is at the same time identical to the primeval view – that is, the patrification of the heavens , or catasterisation – which also finds its expression in church sculpture and painting. For children this primeval view is the most straightforward, an explanation and resolution of the Copernican question. To turn all the worlds into worlds guided by the reasoning powers of resurrected generations is also the most important goal of art."

— Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov

"I do not know if there are in fact such things as definable social standards of aesthetics that would have any historical or artistic value, but whether there are or not it seems clear to me that for the painter nothing less than complete personal involvement of a moral nature will do."

— Patrick Swift

"Imagination... implies originality. It results in a reflection... of the working mind of the designer. ...Imagination may be called the dynamic force in art. ...It is the quality which distinguishes the artistic from the photographic representation of nature."

— Ernest Flagg

"Neo-Plasticism has its roots in Cubism. It could just as easy be called the Painting of Real Abstraction. Since the abstract can be expressed by a plastic reality.. .It achieves what all painting has tried to achieve but has been able to express only in a veiled manner. By their position and their dimension as well as by the importance of given to colour, the coloured planes express in a plastic way only relations and not forms. Neo-Plasticism imparts to these relations an aesthetic balance and thereby expresses universal harmony.. .For the moment what art had discovered must still be limited to art itself. Our environment cannot yet be realized as a creation of pure harmony. Art today is at the very point formerly occupied by religion. In its deepest meaning art was the transposition of the natural ; in practice it always sought to achieve harmony between man and untransposed nature. Generally speaking, so do Theosophy and Anthroposophy, although these already possessed the original symbol of balance. And this is why they never were able to achieve equivalent relations, that is to say true harmony."

— Piet Mondrian

"What madman, or what clever-dick with the instincts of a counterfeiter was the first to paint a sphere in trompe l'oeil on a surface that is vertical and rigorously flat! And that's what they teach at the Beaux-Arts ! How could such idiocies ever have survived the verdict of Pascal?" . That was how, in 1906, Albert Gleizes was feeling his way towards Cubism and condemned in advance those who never saw anything in it other than a shibboleth . It was still nothing more than a need he felt, the need not for an intellectual art but for an art that would be something other than a systematic absurdity. Quite clearly nature and the painting make up two different worlds which have nothing in common, and what is quite in its place in the one cannot also be in its place in the other."

— Jean Metzinger

"From the earliest days of my pupilage to art I had been instinctively drawn towards the paintings of Turner, Corot, Constable, Bonington, and Watts, with an intense admiration for their manner in viewing, and methods of re-creating, nature upon their canvases ; and in later years I had been fascinated by the works of more modern artists, such as La Thangue, , Edward Stott, and Robert Meyerheim."

— Wynford Dewhurst

"Spring. All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher! And now I have become a bureaucrat as well as by compiling a large, precise catalogue of all my artistic productions ever since my childhood. I have left out only the school drawings, studies of nudes, etc., because they lack creative self-sufficiency."

"In my search for these values I like to work both realistically and abstractly. In my drawing and painting I turn from one to the other as a necessity or impulse and not because of a preconceived design of action. When drawing what I see I am usually most conscious of the underlying principle of abstract form in human beings and their relationship one to the other. In making my abstract drawings I am most often aware of those human values which dominate the structure and meaning of abstract forms. Sculpture is the fusion of these two attitudes and I like to be free as to the degree of abstraction and realism in carving. The dominant feeling will always be the love of humanity and nature; and the love of sculpture for itself."

— Barbara Hepworth

"I feel an inner relationship which leads from the antique tot the Gothic, especially from the early ancient art, and from the Gothic to my own feeling for form. A great simplicity of form is something marvelous. As far back as I can remember, I have tried to put the simplicity of nature into the heads that I was painting or drawing. Now I have a real sense of being able to learn from the heads of ancient sculpture.."

— Paula Modersohn-Becker

"Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation."

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives.. .The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes."

— Eugène Fromentin

"In our time it has been seen, as I hope to show quite shortly, that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature. Much more then it is probable that the first men, being less removed from their divine origin, were more perfect, possessing a brighter intelligence, and that with Nature as a guide, a pure intellect for master, and the lovely world as a model, they originated these noble arts, and by gradually improving them brought them at length, from small beginnings, to perfection. I do not deny that there must have been an originator, since I know quite well that there must have been a beginning at some time, due to some individual."

— Giorgio Vasari

"“The doctrine which thus comes to light, that in art man not only shares literally in the creative office of God, but enriches Nature with new members that express its divine Ground in a still higher form, will seem to many overbold — extravagant and irreverent. But its advocates are neither few nor inconsiderable; it is supported by the greatest names."

— George Holmes Howison

"My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It's a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that's one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature."

"The interval during which a painting is mistaken for the real thing, or a real thing for a painting, is the triumphant moment of trompe l'oeil art. The artist appears to be potent as nature, if not superior to it. Almost immediately, though, the spectator's uncertainty is eliminated by his recognition that the counterfeit is counterfeit. Once the illusion is dissolved, what is left is an object that is interesting not as a work of art but as a successful simulation of something that is not art. The major response to it is curiosity: "How did he do it?"

— Harold Rosenberg

"I believe that art has a kind of Rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false. And that's why classical paintings, which are right in their own terms, are so necessary for me. In addition to that there's nature, which also has this rightness."

— Gerhard Richter

"These paintings, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous, in the great workshop of nature, like the clouds, the mountains, the seas, the animals, and man himself. Yes! Man should go back to nature! Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages."

"If Russian painters were condemned to become the pupils of the West they were, I think, rather unfaithful ones by their very nature. The best Russian realist conflicts with the realism of Courbet. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves on perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissaro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root. Why my language itself is foreign to them. Why people do not place confidence in me. Why the artistic circles fail to recognize me. Why in Russia I am entirely useless.. .In Paris, it seemed to me that I was discovering everything, above all a mastery of technique.. .It was not in technique alone that I sought the meaning of art then. It was as if the gods had stood before me.. .I had the impression that we are still only roaming on the surface of matter, that we are afraid to plunge into chaos, to shatter and overthrow beneath our feet the familiar surface."

— Marc Chagall

"The principal artists of the era of the revival of letters, such as Leon Baptista Alberti, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Durer, with many others who what art ought to borrow from science, felt the necessity of resorting to observation, in order to rebuild in some sort the ruined monument of ancient artistical skill. They studied nature in a philosophical manner; sought to strike out the limits within which they ought to confine themselves in order to be truthlike... and from those profound studies which kept them ever before the face of nature, they deduced original views and new models, destined to distinguish for ever that celebrated age. The proportions of the human body did not alone attract their attention: anatomy, perspective, and chemistry, formed parts of their studies; nothing was neglected; and some of these great artists even gained for themselves a first place among the geometers of their day. Their successors have not devoted themselves to such serious studies, and hence it so frequently happens that they are reduced to content themselves, either with copying from those who went before them, or with working after individual models, whose proportions they modify according to mere caprice, without having any just or proper ideas of the beautiful."

— Adolphe Quetelet

Key thinkers on this theme

Friedrich Nietzsche· Philosophy Bertrand Russell· Philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer· Philosophy Agnes Martin· Art Gerhard Richter· Art

Related ideas in Art

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