17 Artists on Beauty
“The pain passes but the beauty remains.”
— Pierre Auguste Renoir
“The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.”
— Francis Bacon
“If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon nd yourself without it. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
“Hollywood is beautiful. Everybody is plastic—but I love plastic.” — Andy Warhol
“I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!”
— Pablo Picasso
“To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.”
— Paul Klee
Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.
— Marc Chagall
“Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.”
— Eugene Delacroix
“If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”
— Camille Pissarro
“United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.”
— Francisco Goya
“A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day and his children by night.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
“I seated ugliness on my knee and almost immediately grew tired of it.”
— Salvador Dali
“Mud, rubbish and dirt are man’s companions all his life; shouldn’t they be precious to him? And isn’t one doing man a service to remind him of their beauty?”
— Jean Dubuffet
“I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”
— Marcel Duchamp
“I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
“Why should beauty be suspect?”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir
My first job after leaving school in 1969 was as a trainee Art Technician in the Arts & Crafts department of a teacher training college. They had this little quotation framed on the wall near the entrance of what was a very modern building. It was credited to St Francis of Assisi and I have committed it to memory … “That which is truly beautiful is often simple and restrained”.
I like what Thomas Moran said. Maybe it’s too matter-of-fact to quote, not profound or erudite, just obvious. Which was to the effect that the most beautiful scenery in nature make the most beautiful landscape paintings. And that would be, in capable hands, I would add.