Top 35 Art History Quotes

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

The Metropolitan Museum has all of our collections online, all our scholarly publications and catalogues since 1965. We have online features like the timeline of art history.

In the ‘Garnethill’ trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O’Donnell’s dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they’re middle-class – they’re just working class because they speak with accents.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it’s always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.

I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It’s the most radical thing.

I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge.

Maybe philosophy – I love talking about ideas. Or maybe art history. I was thinking about psychology, then I got really afraid because everybody says it’s terribly boring.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn’t mean having read a few art history books.

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

To me, James Harden is like basketball’s Picasso – he’s an artist whose work you respect, even if you don’t always understand its significance until later. (Or maybe Van Gogh or some other artist – I’m not an art history buff, but you get my point).

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, ‘Wow, you can really draw.’ Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

Studying art history is actually one of the few ways of getting a good job in the arts sector. It’s hard to be a museum curator without it, work in any senior position in an auction house or gallery, or become a serious art critic.

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.

After I finished school I wanted to do a bunch of courses – art history in Florence, fashion in London and acting in Los Angeles. So I started with acting, and soon I knew this is it, this is what I need to do.

‘The Art of the Brick’ is an exhibition I’ve done where I’ve taken some works of art from art history and replicated them all out of Lego bricks.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there’s nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

I grew up in Rome, in actually what I would say was a liberal, open-minded family. My father was an architect and my mother was a teacher of art history, so it was sort of intellectual, and maybe a bit much for me when I was a child.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art’s sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.

I think that if someone told me I could have been a visual artist, I might have been a visual artist instead. And if I’d known I could have done art history, I would have done that. But I just didn’t know.

Because I’m an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That’s what really art history is. You’re looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

Take Damien Hirst out of contemporary art history, and there’s an incredible void. Great artists, like great people, have second acts.

Cinemascope has become synonymous with ‘epic,’ and absolutely if you’re shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there’s not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.

If I can’t find a project that I’m really interested in, I’ll just go back to college where I’ve been studying art history and French. I’m also going to study English and philosophy – the whole curriculum!

I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.

I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

You know how when you get older you actually want to learn? When I went to college, I wasn’t as interested in the art history classes as I am now.

Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.