Quote

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Harold Rosenberg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Harold Rosenberg
Age: 72 †
Born: 1906
Born: February 2
Died: 1978
Died: July 11
Art Critic
Art Historian
Journalist
Philosopher
Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Come
Failing
Metamorphoses
Accepting
Metamorphosis
Achieve
Resigned
Story
Halt
Success
Arrested
Stories
Fail
Become
Accept
America
Americans

More quotes by Harold Rosenberg

Image
Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
An artist is a person who has invented an artist.
Harold Rosenberg
Image
Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.
Harold Rosenberg