Jerry Saltz Quotes

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

I like '50s and '60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.

I didn't think much about Marsden Hartley until very recently, but Gertrude Stein found him to be the best American painter in Europe at the time she was alive. I consider my tributes to him my most important works.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

Andy Warhol defined Pop Art.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

I don't wake up in the morning and think about Franz Kline.

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.

I'm really into California art from the '60s. I like a lot of Bay Area artists, like Nathan Oliveira and Bruce Conner.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

Cubism is still the most important art movement for the same reason that John D. is still the most important Rockefeller.

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.