Salvador Dalí | Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages, 1937
• "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot".
"Il primo uomo a paragonare le guance di una giovane donna a una rosa era ovviamente un poeta; il primo a ripeterlo era forse un idiota".
• "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery".
"Il compito dell'artista è sempre quello di approfondire il mistero".
Lee Bontecou:
• "Since my early years until now, the natural world and its visual wonders and horrors -man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences- to me are all one. It is in the spirit of this feeling that the primary influences on my work have occurred".
• "A painting without something disturbing in it - what's that?"
"Un dipinto senza qualcosa di inquietante: cos'è?"
• "A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people".
"Un dipinto richiede un po' di mistero, un po' di vaghezza, un po' di fantasia. Quando rendi sempre il tuo significato perfettamente chiaro, finisci per annoiare la gente".
.jpg)
Edgar Degas | Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, 1880
Jim Dine:
• "I’m not a pop artist. For me pop never was.… Pop is concerned with exteriors. I’m concerned with interiors. When I use objects, I see them as a vocabulary of feelings. I can spend a lot of time with objects, and they leave me as satisfied as a good meal. I don’t think pop artists feel that way".
"Non sono un artista pop. Per me il pop non lo è mai stato... Il pop si occupa dell'esterno. Io mi occupo dell'interno. Quando uso gli oggetti, li vedo come un vocabolario di emozioni. Posso passare molto tempo con gli oggetti, e mi lasciano soddisfatto come un buon pasto. Non credo che gli artisti pop la pensino così"
Jim Dine | The heart on the hand, 1986
• "A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result".
"Un consiglio: non copiare troppo la natura. L'arte è un'astrazione; mentre sogni in mezzo alla natura, estrapola l'arte da essa e concentrati su ciò che creerai come risultato".
Paul Gauguin | The Washerwomen, Arles, 1888
Lucio Fontana:
• "From the outset I never called the work I was doing…painting, I called it a ‘spatial concept’. This is because for me painting is a matter of ideas.… At a time when people were talking about ‘planes’-the surface plane, the depth plane, etc.- making a hole was a radical gesture which broke the space of the canvas as if to say: after this we are free to do what we like".
"Fin dall'inizio non ho mai chiamato il lavoro che facevo... pittura, l'ho chiamato un "concetto spaziale". Questo perché per me la pittura è una questione di idee... In un'epoca in cui si parlava di "piani" - il piano di superficie, il piano di profondità, ecc. - fare un buco era un gesto radicale che rompeva lo spazio della tela, come a dire: dopo questo siamo liberi di fare ciò che vogliamo".
• "The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity".
"L'oggetto dell'arte non è riprodurre la realtà, ma creare una realtà della stessa intensità".
Grace Hartigan:
• "I cannot expect even my own art to provide all the answers- only to hope it keeps asking the right questions".
"Non posso aspettarmi che nemmeno la mia arte fornisca tutte le risposte, posso solo sperare che continui a porre le domande giuste".
• "Barriers are continually being made out of... new values which have overturned the barriers of the past. Thus one sees that it is not basically the new value that is of prime importance, but rather the spirit that is revealed in this value, as well as the freedom necessary for this revelation.."
"Si creano continuamente barriere... a causa di nuovi valori che hanno rovesciato le barriere del passato. Si vede quindi che non è fondamentalmente il nuovo valore ad essere di primaria importanza, ma piuttosto lo spirito che si rivela in questo valore, così come la libertà necessaria per questa rivelazione".
Wassily Kandinsky | Composition IV, 1911
Lee Krasner:
• "As a painter, I never thought of myself as anything but Lee Krasner… I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock".
"Come pittore, non ho mai pensato a me stesso come a nient'altro che Lee Krasner... Ho dipinto prima di Pollock, durante Pollock, dopo Pollock".
Fernand Léger:
• "Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power".
Roy Lichtenstein:
• "My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way…. People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it’s really the position of line that’s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it".
Jacques Lipchitz:
• "I found so-called great art too pompous, too stiff. What at this time was called minor art was freer, more imaginative, more open to all kinds of unorthodox expression, all kinds of daring in the handling of materials, and I preferred to surround myself with this type of art than with the great collectors' pieces. I had always in my mind that I was collecting for learning".
Agnes Martin:
• "I want to emphasize the fact that we all have the same experience and the same concern, but the artist must know exactly what the experience is. He must pursue the truth relentlessly. Once he sees this fact his feet are on the path. If you want to know the truth you will know it. The manipulation of materials in an artwork is a result of this state of mind. The artist works by awareness of his own state of mind".
• "I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do - no matter who they are. Isn't it enough just to express yourself?"
"Non capisco perché dovremmo mai pensare a cosa pensano gli altri di ciò che facciamo, non importa chi siano. Non basta semplicemente esprimersi?"
Pablo Picasso:
• "Woe to you the day it is said that you are finished! To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul - to give it its final blow; the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture".
"Guai a te il giorno in cui ti diranno che hai finito! Finire un'opera? Finire un quadro? Che assurdità! Finirlo significa finirla, ucciderla, privarla della sua anima, darle il colpo di grazia; il più infelice, sia per il pittore che per il quadro".
Jackson Pollock:
• "There was a reviewer…who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment".
"C'era un recensore... che ha scritto che le mie foto non avevano né inizio né fine. Non lo intendeva come un complimento, ma lo era. Era un bel complimento".
Frank Stella:
• "I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting - the humanistic values that they... find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there... What you see is what you get".
• "I have tried to do what is true and not ideal".
"Ho cercato di fare ciò che è vero e non ideale".
• "The painter of the future will be a colorist in a way no one has been before".
"Il pittore del futuro sarà un colorista come nessuno lo è mai stato prima".
Vincent van Gogh | The Harvest, 1888
• "Art is anything you can get away with".
"L'arte è tutto ciò che puoi ottenere".
![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PEA6zlrSZtg/X_930Y1W_bI/AAAAAAAG7g0/cAlR16TZ2oIRhDZu0ZD66-m6FdF4fICWACPcBGAsYHg/s0/Facebook.png" "Condividi su Facebook")
