Painters From The United States

"Have you wondered why all the windows in heaven were broken? Have you seen the homeless in the grave of God's hand? Do you want to acquaint the larks with the fatuous music of war?"

"You, the village; I, the stranger; this, the road: And each is the work of all. Then, not that man do more, or stop pity; but that he be Wider in living; that all his cities fly a clean flag... We have been alone too long, love; it is terribly late For the pierced feet on the water and we must not die now."

"You, the sought for; I, the seeker; this, the search: And each is the mission of all. For greatness is only the drayhorse that coaxes The built cart out; and where we go is reason. But genius is an enormous littleness, a trickling Of heart that covers alike the hare and the hunter."

"You, the woman; I, the man; this, the world: And each is the work of all."

"If you don't know what Reinhardt's paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about [after Reinhardt's death in 1967]."

"I wanted to be soft like Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt."

"The artists is responsible for his history and his nature, his history is part of his nature."

"vagueness is a 'romantic' value.. ..an emphasis on geometry is an emphasis on the 'known', on order and knowledge."

"The one standard in art is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is, its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of art."

"The one art that is abstract and pure enough to have the one problem and possibility, in our time and timelessness, of the 'one single grand original problem' is pure abstract painting. Abstract painting is not just another school or movement or style but the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and un-entangled, styleless, universal painting. No other art or painting is detached or empty or immaterial enough."

"The art of 'figuring' or 'picturing' is not a fine art. An artist who is lobbying as a 'creature of circumstances' or log rolling as a 'victim of fate' is not a fine master artist. No one ever forces an artist to be pure."

"I didn’t choose painting … It chose me. I didn’t have any talent. I just had genius."

"I feel that we are living a very fragmented life; the whole world — you too. So I perceive the world in fragments. It is somewhat like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. A person can be very, very tiny. And a billboard can make a person very large. You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure — that doesn't deter me in the least."

"I've painted for a very long time, but I don't get tired or bored by it; I love to do it. If I don't paint one day, I don't feel well physically or mentally. My eyes bother me when I don't paint. But when I paint a full day, I feel satisfied and everything seems to be OK. I would never stop, never retire. I don't see how people can retire; I don't understand that. My brother Moses died while he was painting. He was actually working on a painting, and the last words he said were to the model: "Phoebe, don't frown." Then he died. He worked to the very last minute."

"Her art was marked by a willingness to employ a variety of styles in a modernist idiom, to go back and forth from art-historical references to pop-culture references to autobiographical material."

"Now as before it is the vulgar and the vital and the possibility of its transformation into the beautiful which continues to challenge and fascinate me... Or perhaps the subject of my art is like the definition of humor — emotional pain remembered in tranquillity."

"Pop Art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion."

"If art is to survive it must describe and express people, their lives and times."

"There is a war against vice in Lancaster. I am going home to speak for vice."

"We all grasped on everything new, and despite the atmosphere of New York [ in the 1930's] worked on everything but our own identities. I make exceptions for Graham and Davis, especially Davis, who though at his least recognized or exhibited stage was the solid citizen for a group a bit younger who were trying to find their stride."

"Stuart Davis.. ..is one of but few, who realized his canvas as a.. .. two-dimensional surface plane."

"I paint what I see in America, in other words I paint the American scene."

"I think of Abstract Art in the same way I think of all Art, Past and Present. I see it as divided into two Major categories, Objective and Subjective. Objective Art is Absolute Art. Subjective Art is Illustration, or communication by Symbols, Replicas, and Oblique Emotional Passes. They are both Art, but their Content has no Identity. Their difference cannot be defined as a difference of Idiom, because all Paintings have the Laws of Design as a common denominator. Design exists as an Idiom of Color-Space Logic, and it also exists in an Idiom of Representational Likenesses. Objective Art and Subjective Art exist in both Idioms. Their difference can only be defined in terms of what the Artist thinks his Purpose means-its Content as a Design Image."

"For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope."

"Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision)."

"Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend."

"The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism—Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860—it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason."

"A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the "How Long? Not Long" speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan."

"I'm not staying contemporary for the big record companies, I don't follow the latest fashions. I never sing a song that's badly written. In the 1920s and '30s, there was a renaissance in music that was the equivalent of the artistic Renaissance. Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and others just created the best songs that had ever been written. These are classics, and finally they're not being treated as light entertainment. This is classical music."

"I've taken stuff from people, too. You know though, if you steal from one person, you're just a thief. But if you steal from everyone, that's research."

"I would definitely not be homosexual. I have nothing against what they do and I don't deny that I've engaged in sex with males but that I'm bisexual."

"The idea that I'm a homosexual thrill killer, that I stroll down the streets and stalk young boys and slaughter them... Hell, if you could see my schedule, my work schedule, you knew damn well that I was never out there."

"All the police are going to get me for is running a funeral parlor without a license."

"Girls are no fun to kill. Guys are more interesting to kill."

"You know, clowns can get away with murder"

"Taking my life will not compensate for the loss of the others. The State is murdering me."

"I am at peace with God."

"We've linked 16 of the bodies to one individual. We've linked 14 more to another individual. All these people had keys to the house."

"That one mother [of victim] that gets on television all the time, who thinks I should get 33 injections, I think she ought to take 33 valiums and go lay down."

"Whether its [David] Berkowitz, whether its [[Ted Bundy|[Ted] Bundy]], whether its... Wayne Williams down in Atlanta..., or Charlie Manson—I don't comment about other cases for the simple fact is that I wasn't there."

"When they paint the image that I was this monster who picked up these alter boys along the street and swatted them like flies I said "this is ludicrous"."

"I don't believe in hitting children."

"If they want to be convinced or [are] brainwashed into what they believe, then fine, then go ahead and kill me. But 'vengeance is mine saith the Lord' because you would have executed someone who didn't commit the crime."

"The dead won't bother you, it's the living you got to to worry about"

"Maxfield Parrish was certainly one of our most prominent illustrators and hardly a home in America existed that didn’t have a Maxfield Parrish print. I’m an illustrator. Maxfield Parrish was a painter-illustrator. He was in the Golden Age of Illustration. When I was in art school I admired him. He was one of my gods."

"Thank you for allowing me to use colors as rich and deep as you please. I had always wanted to do so, yet was never allowed because of the color capabilities of our lithographers today. Now that I have done it, I don't think I'll ever go back."

"The whole question of pictures made to order is a darn peculiar form of merchandize. Buyers seem to like the tiresome MP blue, for one thing, and girls having a pleasant chat for another. They must look pleasant like Daybreak and Garden of Allah and not contemplative like Hilltop, Stars and Dreaming, which are not so popular .... There are countless artists whose shoes I'm not worthy to polish — whose prints would not pay the printer! ... I'm beginning to doubt my judgment!"

"I'm done with girls on rocks! I've painted them for thirteen years and I could paint them and sell them for thirteen more. That's the peril of the commercial art game. It tempts a man to repeat himself. it's an awful thing to get to be a rubber stamp. I'm quitting my rut now while I'm still able."

"Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art... consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!"

"How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place. For the most part the place is out of doors, for up in this northern wilderness when nature puts on a show it is an inspiring one. There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space, there is no such thing as sitting down outside and trying to make a “portrait” of it. It lasts for only a minute, for one thing, and it isn’t an inspiration that can be copied on the spot..."