A Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

Robert Rauschenberg

Quote Topics

Intended Old Paintings Read Sure Way Were

Quote Author

Robert Rauschenberg
American - Artist
October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended

Robert Rauschenberg

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Ray Bradbury

The spot paintings and spin paintings were trying to find mechanical ways to make paintings.

Damien Hirst

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.

William S. Burroughs

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

Claes Oldenburg

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.

Antoni Tapies

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

Glenn Ligon

People don't always read things the way they are intended.

Kenneth Cole

If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.

Elizabeth Bishop

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

Lascelles Abercrombie

I enjoy thinking about how paintings can change depending on where they are - how they look in a gallery or in relation to other paintings, or in different rooms. Paintings can change the way we experience and see the world.

Stephen Beal

People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.

David Salle

If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created television? Read as it was intended - for exercise. The more you read, the more you expand your - what's the word I'm looking for? - your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile of words that you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.

Steve Carell

Picasso and Matisse were the guys I wanted to get away from, and cubism is all still lifes. Their paintings are all closed drawings. And still life is a perfect form for that. By the mid-'50s, I sort of dropped the still life. The large picture was a way of getting around them, too. The abstract expressionists were also into the large form because it was a way of getting around Matisse and Picasso. Picasso can't paint big paintings. Matisse didn't bother after a certain point.