Picasso himself denied that he was making experiments. He said he did not search, he found. He mocked at those who wanted to understand his art. ‘Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?’ Of course, he was right. No painting can be fully ‘explained’ in words. But words are sometimes useful pointers, they help to clear away misunderstandings and can give us at least an inkling of the situation in which the artist finds himself. I believe that the situation which led Picasso to his different ‘finds’ is very typical of twentieth-century art. -
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, page 564, Zettel 160
What upset the public about Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty…But the men who claimed to be serious artists should forget that if they must change the appearance of things they should idealize them rather than make them ugly was strongly resented. But (Edvard) Munch might have retorted that a shout of anguish is not beautiful, and that it would be insincere to look only at the pleasing side of life. For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty in art was only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical masters, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the stark facts of our existence and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly. It became almost a point of honour with them to avoid anything which smelt of prettiness and polish, and to shock the ‘bougeois‘ out of his real or imagined complacency. -
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, Page 544, Zettel 152
…in all the struggles and gropings there was one thing he was prepared to sacrifice if need be: the conventional ‘correctness’ of outline. He (Cezanne) was not out to distort nature; but he did not mind very much if it became distorted in some minor detail provided this helped him to obtain the desired effect….he hardly realized that this example of indifference to ‘correct drawing’ would start a landslide in art. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, Page 544, Zettel 152
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, Page 543, Zettel 151
Cezanne had ceased to take any of the traditional methods of painting for granted. he had decided to start from scratch as if no painting had been done before him….Cezanne had chosen his motifs to study some specific problems that he wanted to solve….- The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, Page 543, Zettel 151
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich Page 154, Zettel 148
The great artists of subsequent periods had made one discovery after another which allowed them to conjure up a convincing picture of the visible world, but none of them had seriously challenged the conviction that each object in nature has its definite fixed form and colour which must be easily recognizable in a painting. It may be said, therefore, that Manet and his followers brought about a revolution in the rendering of colours which is almost comparable with the revolution in the representation of forms brought about by the Greeks. They discovered that, if we look at nature in the open, we do not see individual objects each with its own colour but rather a bright medley of tints which blend in our eye or really in our mind. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich Page 154, Zettel 148
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 240
To carry out his intention of holding up a mirror to reality in all its details, van Eyck had to improve the technique of painting. He was the inventor of oil-painting…If he used oil instead of egg (tempera), he could work much more slowly and accurately. - The History of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 240
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 239
if we want to understand the way in which northern art developed, we must appreciate this infinite care and patience of Jan van Eyck. The southern artists of his generation; the Florentine masters of Brunelleschi’s circle, had developed a method by which, nature could be represented in a picture with almost scientific accuracy. They began with the framework of perspective lines, and they built up the human body through their knowledge of anatomy and of the laws of foreshortenning. Van Eyck took the opposite way. He achieved the illusion of nature by patiently adding detail till his whole picture became like a mirror of the visible world. The difference between northern and Italian art remained important for many years. It is a fair guess to say that any work which excels in the representation of the beautiful surface of things, of flowers, jewels or fabric, will be by a northern artist, most probably by an artist from the Netherlands; while a painting with bold outlines, clear perspective and a sure mastery of the beautiful human body, will be Italian. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 239
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich pg 229
Brunelleschi was not only the initiator of Renaissance architecture. To him, it seems, is due another momentous discovery in the field of art, which also dominated the art of subsequent centuries - that of perspective. We have seen that even the Greeks, who understood foreshadowing, and the Hellenistic painters, who were skilled in creating the illusion of depth, did not know the mathematical laws by which objects appear to diminish in size as they recede from us. We remember that no artist could have drawn the famous avenue of trees leading back into the picture until it vanishes into the horizon. It was Brunelleschi who gave artists mathematical means of solving this problem; and the excitement which this caused among his painter-friends must have been immense. -