Robert Barnes Quotes

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.

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

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

Well, I'd say that the beginning of this thing came through with Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim's, where she opened this gallery and began showing some things that caused a little talk, amongst a lot of other things.

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

In my case, everything starts from Marcel Duchamp and the new expressive possibilities he gave us with his ready-mades. I transferred his artistic language into today's world, choosing, for example, to use pedestrian-crossing stripes as a symbol.

The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

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.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

Appropriation was the language of my generation in many ways. It came out of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein.

I think 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon' is one of the most transfixing paintings of all time. And it was made by a monster of a man.

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.

I didn't really know what I was looking at when I first came across Man Ray's 'Dust Breeding,' his photograph of a work by Marcel Duchamp called 'Large Glass.' It looked like an aerial photograph or a view through a microscope.

The avant-garde makes more sense to me.

I think Mustique is Duchampian - it will always provide an endless source of delight.

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'm a massive fan of Brit Art in general and Damien Hirst in particular. I think he's an absolute genius and should be celebrated in every way.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

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

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.