Art

The finest collection of frames I ever saw.
Scientist and inventor Sir Humphrey Davy, asked his opinion of Paris art galleries. Attrib.

If people only knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures.
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer to W.P. Frith

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.
Marc Chagall

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
Peter Ustinov

Tracey Emin’s bed is art because it’s made by an artist, and yours isn’t, because it isn’t.
AA Gill

Cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.
Kim Howells MP, Culture Minister, on the Turner Prize

Pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat.
Ivan Massow on modern art while Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts

They say Rothko killed himself because he met the people who bought his art.
Adrian Searle

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard

Mrs Balinger is one of those ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
Edith Wharton, novelist

Art today is institutionalised narcissism, a conspiracy between creators and curators to make poor people feel stupid.
Stephen Bayley

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir on Leonardo da Vinci

Degas is nothing but a peeping Tom, behind the coulisses, and among the dressing-rooms of the ballet dancers, noting only travesties of fallen debased womanhood.
Pamphlet published by The Churchman

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
Oscar Wilde

The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.
Joe Orton

The masses’ bad taste is rooted more deeply in reality than the intellectuals’ good taste.
Bertolt Brecht

In the art world, ‘tasteful’ is probably a bigger insult than ‘tasteless’.
Grayson Perry

He will never be anything but a dauber.
Titian on Tintoretto

Daubaway Weirdsley.
Punch on Aubrey Beardsley, British artist

Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr Rippingille.
John Hunt, 19th-century art critic, on Rembrandt

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.
Tom Stoppard on John Ruskin, in The Times Literary Supplement

I don’t mind. I have gloves on.
Mark Twain after running his hand over a Whistler painting, which caused the artist to exclaim: ‘Don’t touch that, Can’t you see, it isn’t dry yet.’

Well, not bad, but there are decidedly too many of them, and they are not very well arranged. I would have done it differently.
James Whistler when asked if he agreed that the stars were especially beautiful one night

Perhaps not, but then you can’t call yourself a great work of nature.
James Whistler after a sitter complained that his portrait was not a great work of art

The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.
James Whistler after a snob asked him why he had been born in such an unfashionable place as Lowell, Massachusetts

I cannot tell you that, madam. Heaven has granted me no offspring.
James Whistler when asked if he thought genius hereditary

Mr Whistler has always spelt art with a capital ‘I’.
Oscar Wilde on James Whistler

My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don’t you ever finish them?
Frederic Leighton, British painter, on James Whistler

My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?
James Whistler’s riposte to Frederic Leighton

Like a carbuncle on the face of an old and valued friend.
Charles, Prince of Wales, 1986, on a proposed extension to the National Gallery

A pot of paint has been thrown in the public’s face.
Variously believed to have been said by John Ruskin about Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocker, or by Camille Mauclair about Jean Puy’s Stroll under the Pines

Mr Lewis’ pictures appeared to have been painted by a mailed fist in a cotton glove.
Dame Edith Sitwell on Wyndham Lewis

It resembles a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a plate of tomatoes.
Mark Twain on J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship

It makes me look as if I were straining at a stool.
Winston Churchill on his portrait by Graham Sutherland

If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the woman in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint.
Mrs Pablo Picasso on her husband’s paintings

His pictures seem to resemble, not pictures, but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.
Cyril Asquith on Paul Klee

A decorator tainted with insanity.
Kenyon Cox on Paul Gauguin

The only genius with an IQ of 60.
Gore Vidal on Andy Warhol

Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.
American artist Chuck Close

How can I take an interest in my work when I don’t like it?
Francis Bacon

I stick to my business, which is art. Suggest you stick to yours, which is butchery.
Jacob Epstein to Nikita Khrushchev after he made what was described as a ‘vigorous’ observation about Epstein’s work