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No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics. (p. 24)

— Robert Hughes Donald Friend (1965)

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Art

More quotes by Robert Hughes

The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

Time magazine (1996)

What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Hughes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.