A Quote by Clement Greenberg

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Clement Greenberg

Quote Topics

Art First Looks Original Original Art Profoundly Ugly

Quote Author

Clement Greenberg
American - Essayist
January 16, 1909 - May 7, 1994

Many years ago, Clement Greenberg said, 'All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.' This should be updated now to 'All profoundly ugly work looks original at first.

Walter Darby Bannard

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Mona Simpson

Ah, March! we know thou art Kind-hearted, spite of ugly looks and threats, And, out of sight, art nursing April's violets!

Helen Hunt Jackson

The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory - disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Rudolf Steiner

There is not a single soul that jealousy looks good on. Nobody! It looks ugly on everybody and it makes us act ugly - it makes us act out of character.

Beth Moore

Beautiful is he who recognizes what is truly beautiful even if the surface is ugly. Truthful is he who says what is true even if the truth is ugly. Ugly is he who measures beauty by its exterior without first weighing the interior. And ugly is the man who judges harshly what he sees looking out without first judging what he sees in the mirror.

Suzy Kassem

She was ugly from the front, and I said ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. Well, I could handle it behind her.

Lyle Lovett

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

Jacob Bronowski

The wretched beings depicted by Millet touch us profoundly because he loved them profoundly. They have nothing in common with vulgar ugliness. Beauty will always remain the highest aim of art.

Jules Breton

The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

D. H. Lawrence

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Roy Lichtenstein

Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art.

Mike Curran

No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.

Andre Maurois

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

Corin Nemec

The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved.