Looking at art...

Paul Cézanne to Charles Camoin, 28 January 1902

"...one says more and perhaps better things about painting when facing the motif than when discussing purely speculative theories -- in which as often as not one loses oneself." *

Robert Henri in The Art Spirit, 1923

"The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an art education; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order." *Henri

yes!

Keith Haring in his Journal, October 14, 1978

"The meaning of art as it is experienced by the viewer, not the artist.
The artist's ideas are not essential to the art as seen by the viewer.
The viewer is an artist in the sense that he conceives a given piece of his own way that is unique to him.
His own imagination determines what it is, what it means.
The viewer does not have to be considered during the conception of the art, but should not be told, then, what to think or how to conceive it or what it means. There is no need for definition."*

Alberto Giacometti, 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. Today, when I go to the Louvre, all these representations of the external world -- and until fifty years ago, all painting, all sculpture were direct representations of the external world, weren't they? -- strike me as partial, precarious. I ask myself how the devil they could have seen it like that. And what astonishes me, what really gets me, isn't the paintings and sculptures anymore, but the people who look at them. Now I look only at the people who are looking." *Schneider

Pierre Soulages, interviewed by Pierre Schneider in Louvre Dialogues, 1967

"A work is interesting in the degree to which it escapes its creator's intentions and the spectator's interpretations." *Schneider

Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1871), on painting versus writing

"Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment. -- This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her."

I digress into the words of a writer's fictional character, but this viewpoint is fascinating in the context of Delacroix's views on the superiority of painting as an art, or Henri's thoughts on capturing the moment in a portrait. Somehow, I think that acknowledging what painting is not sets the imagination free and makes looking at a painting even richer.

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