Great Throughts Treasury

"Art is significant deformity."

"The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist's eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder."

"No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture "

"Art is a passion or it is nothing."

"We want every scrap of knowledge we can glean from archaeology, from political and social history and from the study of documents. We want to know all we can about the origins and circumstances of a work of art. But besides this knowledge you have to practice an art, the art of looking at works of art with the most sensitive and vivid response possible. And perhaps the most important part of that art consists in the power to maintain your spirit in a condition of tense passivity, a state of passive receptiveness in which you are alert to its appeal, ready to vibrate in harmony with it. The aim I have in view has been to suggest to you possible methods of such a training of aesthetic apprehension."