In art progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits. Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and give impulses to creation. Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence. New means, new subjects. The subject is not the object; it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means.
Georges BraqueRelated topics
art decadence extension force form knowledge limited limitation lyricism primitive meansRelated quotes
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.
Hans Hofmann
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.
Yehudi Menuhin
Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.
Laura Riding
Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, "That's what it means to have a style"; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, "It is a style that no subject can change."
Randall Jarrell
Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we're living in... All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.
Jackson Pollock
