It is just as wrong to judge paintings from the point of view of pictures as it is to judge pictures from the point of view of pai...nting. A painting has its own rule, its own justification within itself. A picture has its criterion outside itself, in the external reality it imitates. Several critics have recently made the remark that nonrepresentational art has this major defect, that being unrelated to external reality, it has no criterion by which it can be judged. The argument would be valid if the art of painting were the art of picturing. As it is, all judgments and appreciations of paintings founded upon their relation to an external model are irrelevant to painting. A painting is the embodiment of a form in a matter; the whole being of a picture is determined by the relationship that obtains between the image itself and some external reality.... As compared with a painting, whose ultimate end is to achieve a fitting object of contemplation, images are characterized by their ambition to represent all the objects they include, and to represent these objects with all the details that are compatible with their pictorial representation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art--that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, express...ed by every means available to the arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to th...e natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all agree now--by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty--that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful becaus...e it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »