Quotes by Art Theorists

Simplicity is an exact medium between too little and too much.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.
Kazimir Malevich
The artist must be blind to "recognized" and "unrecognized" form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity.
Wassily Kandinsky
With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.
Wassily Kandinsky
Man, as a form, bears within him the eternal principle of being, and by economic movement along his endless path his form is also transformed, just as everything that lives in nature was transformed in him.
Kazimir Malevich
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.
Wassily Kandinsky
To those that are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner.
Wassily Kandinsky
I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea
Kazimir Malevich
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
Wassilly Kandinsky
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
Vasily Kandinsky
(...) an inner feeling called "Stimmung" by the germans and best translated as sentiment (it is to be regreted that this word, sentiment, which is meant to describe the poetical efforts of an artist living soul, has been misused and finally, ridiculed. Was there ever a great word that the masses did not try immediatly to cheapen and desecrate?) (...)
Wassily Kandinsky
Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us. A child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame.
Wassily Kandinsky
Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.
Kazimir Malevich