black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.

Ad Reinhardt

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes.
AD REINHARDT

Art Chinese Class Especially History Painting People Person
Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are.
AD REINHARDT

Art Artist Connected Country Exhibition Museum Outside Painting School
As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.
AD REINHARDT

Design Feeling Hell Picture Software Thousand Word
It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that ‘first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.
AD REINHARDT

Art Creative First Idea Painter Painting Right Thinking
If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you’d want to suggest someplace, but there’s no place. I wouldn’t know where to send a student to study.
AD REINHARDT

Painting Someplace Student Study Suggest Want
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
AD REINHARDT

Art Serious Seriously Taken
The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
AD REINHARDT

Abstract Abstraction Art Artist Only Way
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
AD REINHARDT

Anything Artist Good Idea Need Thinking
The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
AD REINHARDT

Art Artist Businessman Painting Uglier
There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.
AD REINHARDT

Black Dull Fresh Lustrous Shadow Sunlight
We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.
AD REINHARDT

Artist Ask Call Name Nobody Ourselves
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more
AD REINHARDT

Abstract Art Fifty Nothing Present Year
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
AD REINHARDT

Activity Artist Color Creative Mature Paint Painting
My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
AD REINHARDT

Darkness Evil Force Light Painting Peace Power
The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.
AD REINHARDT

Art Country Department Happened Job Reflect University
The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea… The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
AD REINHARDT

Art Business Idea Selling Spectacle Themselves Ugliest

We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.

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We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.

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Popular Authors

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