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Excerpts from Misc. 20th Century Artists[editor's note: this section is an aggregate of modern artists' quotes that I found particularly interesting or revealing. If enough material is found for any single artist, their quotes will be spun off into their own glossary page.]
Albers, Joseph |
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Josef Albers, (1888 - 1976)Interviewed by Katherine Kuh in The Artist's Voice, 1960 "Q: Why are interrelationships of color so important to you? Why are they more important than interrelationships of form or space? Marc Chagall, (1887 - 1985)Interviewed by Pierre Schneider in Louvre Dialogues, 1967 "My training has been French. I detest the Russian or Central European color. Their color is like their shoes. Soutine, myself -- we all left because of the color. I was very dark when I arrived in Paris. I was the color of a potato, like Van Gogh. Paris is light." [editor's note: in the following comment, he was discussing his own work on exhibit] "No draftsmanship. It could have been done with the fingers. The color, that is what gives it the Geist. No stylization, no maestria, no pursuit of gesture. The weakness: the way an old man is young. Ordinary. The more ordinary Delacroix or Corot are, the more they are geniuses. What really counts? Who can say? It is like a child asleep in a bed. The color? You buy it in a store. The themes? I borrowed from the Bible because it is a first-rate book. There is no science in me. You must not draw well. Leave your talent alone. Ingres draws well, and it is a nightmare. I could have done my lines differently, on the right instead of the left, up high instead of down low, it would have been the same thing." *Schneider Chuck Close,Interviewed by Denis Pelli in The New York Times, 8/10/1999 "The idea was to make something that was so large that it could not be readily seen as a whole and force the viewer to scan the image in a Brobdingnagian way, as if they were Gulliver's Lilliputians crawling over the surface of the face, falling into a nostril and tripping over a mustache hair." Alberto Giacometti, (1901 - 1966)Interviewed by Pierre Schneider in Louvre Dialogues, 1967 "I used to see the world through the goggles of the existing arts. I would go to the Louvre to see the paintings and sculptures of the past, and I found them more beautiful than reality. Jim HodgesInterviewed by Judith Dobrzynski in The New York Times, 3/24/1999 "I felt beauty was very important to me, so I made as many ugly things as I could -- not because I set out to, but rather to figure out what beauty was. It seemed so abstract." Franz Kline, (1910 - 1962)From "Franz Kline Talking," Evergreen Review, Autumn 1958 "you don't paint the way someone, by observing your life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to in order to give, that's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving." *Johnson From "An Interview with David Sylvester," Living Arts I, 1963 "Paint never seems to behave the same. Even the same paint doesn't, you know. In other words, if you use the same white or black or red, through the use of it, it never seems to be the same. It doesn't dry the same. It doesn't stay there and look at you the same way. Other things seem to affect it. There seems to be something that you can do so much with paint and after that you start murdering it. There are moments or periods when it would be wonderful to plan something and do it and have the thing only do what you planned to do, and then, there are other times when the destruction of those planned things becomes interesting to you. So then, it becomes a question of destroying -- of destroying the planned form; it's like an escape, it's something to do; something to begin the situation. You yourself, you don't decide, but it you want to paint you have to find out some way to start this thing off, whether it's painting it out or putting it on, and so on..." *Johnson Julian SchnabelInterviewed by David Bowie in Modern Painters, Winter 1998 "It used to bother people that I never made work that was a form of signature, where everything looked the same. That was more, say, a quality reserved for sculpture rather than painting. Because painting was more like somebody found the irreducible image and kept painting that over and over again, and I just didn't have that hang-up." ... "...the idea of being at the beginning every time is the thing that has kept me young or fresh. Listen, Chris Walken once said, if you can't surprise yourself, how do you expect to surprise anyone else?" Ben Shahn, (1898 - 1969)Interviewed by Katherine Kuh in The Artist's Voice, 1960 "Art, as I saw it one day when I helped hang a National Academy show while I was a student there, was about cows. In those days, early in the twenties, there were many cow paintings. More than that, the cows always stood knee-deep in purple shadows. For the life of me I never learned to see purple where there was no purple -- and I detested cows. I was frankly distressed at the prospects for me as an artist. But there came a time when I stopped painting, stopped in order to evaluate all these doubts. If I couldn't see purple where there was no purple -- I wouldn't use it. If I didn't like cows, I wouldn't paint them. What then was I to paint? Slowly I found that I must paint those things that were meaningful to me--that I could honestly paint in the shapes and colors I felt belonged to them. What shall I paint? Stories." *Kuh Pierre Soulages, (1919 - )Interviewed by Pierre Schneider in Louvre Dialogues, 1967 "We don't know the why of the choices we make. When I know why I like a thing, I already like it a little less. A work is interesting in the degree to which it escapes its creator's intentions and the spectator's interpretations." | |
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