... a life passed among pictures makes not a painter - else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself. As well allege that he who lives in a library must needs die a poet. Let not Mr Ruskin flatter himself that more education makes the difference between himself and the policeman when both stand gazing in the Gallery.
James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), painter, on John Ruskin (1819-1900), critic |
A decorator tainted with insanity.
Kenyon Cox, American critic, in Harper's Weekly (1913) on Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), French painter |
A monstrous orchid.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) on Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) |
As for M. Cezanne, his name will be forever linked with the most memorable artistic joke of the last fifteen years.
Camille Mauclair, critic, on Paul Cezanne |
Daubaway Weirdsley.
Punch (February 1895) on Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), British artist and author |
Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash, but I believe Michelangelo never did, so I suppose it is part of the tradition.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet |
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) on Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) |
He is nothing but a peeping Tom, behind the coulisses and among the dressing rooms of ballet dancers, noting only travesties on fallen womanhood, most disgusting and offensive.
The Churchman on Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French painter |
He will never be anything but a dauber.
Titian (c. 1490-1576) on Tintoretto (1518-94) |
His pictures seem to resemble not pictures but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.
Cyril Asquith, British critic, on Paul Klee (1879-1940) |
I have been to it and am pleased to find it more odious than I ever dared hope.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) on a Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhibition |
I have seen and heard much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) on James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), American painter |
I mock thee not, though I by thee am mocked; Thou call'st me madman, but I call thee blockhead.
William Blake (1757-1827) on John Flaxman (1755-1826), sculptor |
If people dug up remains of this civilisation a thousand years hence, and found Epstein's statues and that man [Havelock] Ellis, they would think we were just savages.
Doris Lessing (b.1919), South African writer, on Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), British sculptor |
If this is art it must be ostracised as the poets were banished from Plato's republic.
Robert Ross, British critic, in the Morning Post (1910) on Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) |
It makes me look as if I were straining a stool.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965) on a portrait of him by Graham Sutherland (1903-80) |
It resembles a tortoiseshell cat having a fit in a plate of tomatoes.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) on J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship' |
Just explain to Monsieur Renoir that the torso of a woman is not a mass of decomposing flesh, its green and violet spots indicating the state of complete putrefaction of a corpse.
Albert Wolff, critic, on Auguste Renoir (1841 -1919) |
Le Dejeuner sur I'herbe - this is a young man's practical joke, a shameful sore not worth exhibiting in this way.
Louis Etienne, French critic, on the painting by Edouard Manet (1 832-83) |
Mr Lewis' pictures appeared to have been painted by a mailed fist in a cotton glove.
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) on Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957) |
