Top 40 Harold Rosenberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.”

— Harold Rosenberg

2. “The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.”

— Harold Rosenberg

3. “It is not logical for art to be logical. Art goes against the grain of the times as readily as it goes with it and at the very same moment. Instead of seeking the nearest exit, art responds to a new situation by uncovering a labyrinth of problems.”

— Harold Rosenberg

4. “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

5. “What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?”

— Harold Rosenberg

6. “The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.”

— Harold Rosenberg

7. “Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.”

— Harold Rosenberg

8. “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

9. “Intellectuals are a herd of independent minds.”

— Harold Rosenberg

10. “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

11. “Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.”

— Harold Rosenberg

12. “Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by.”

— Harold Rosenberg

13. “The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.”

— Harold Rosenberg

14. “The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.”

— Harold Rosenberg

15. “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.”

— Harold Rosenberg

16. “An artist is a person who has invented an artist.”

— Harold Rosenberg

17. “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.”

— Harold Rosenberg

18. “Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.”

— Harold Rosenberg

19. “The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.”

— Harold Rosenberg

20. “Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist’s work.”

— Harold Rosenberg

21. “Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.”

— Harold Rosenberg

22. “The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”

— Harold Rosenberg

23. “The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.”

— Harold Rosenberg

24. “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

25. “A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.”

— Harold Rosenberg

26. “No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.”

— Harold Rosenberg

27. “American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.”

— Harold Rosenberg

28. “The individual’ is an idea like other ideas.”

— Harold Rosenberg

29. “No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.”

— Harold Rosenberg

30. “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

31. “Greatness in art is always a by-product.”

— Harold Rosenberg

32. “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

33. “Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.”

— Harold Rosenberg

34. “The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.”

— Harold Rosenberg

35. “For the artist, fulfillment of self consists not in marching in the ranks of the liberators but in being entered in the roll of the Masters. The artist tends to find himself in the position of a deserter from his social group or, at best, one who collaborates, with secret reservations.”

— Harold Rosenberg

36. “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

37. “Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.”

— Harold Rosenberg

38. “In reality, however, an artist is a product of art.”

— Harold Rosenberg

39. “Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it...”

— Harold Rosenberg

40. “America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.”

— Harold Rosenberg

41. “Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.”

— Harold Rosenberg

42. “The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.”

— Harold Rosenberg

43. “In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.”

— Harold Rosenberg