Top 35 Will Gompertz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Duchamp thought it was for artists to decide what was and what was not a work of art. His position was that if an artist said something was a work of art, having influenced its context and meaning, then it was a work of art.”

— Will Gompertz

2. “Black Square might appear simplistic, but Malevich’s intentions were complex. He knew that even though he had removed all reference to the known world, the viewer’s brain would attempt to rationalize the painting: to attempt to find meaning.”

— Will Gompertz

3. “It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent Van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless.”

— Will Gompertz

4. “Rodchenko says his one-color, all-over canvases are non-representational and no more than a piece of painted material, while Mark Rothko says that his monochrome canvas is much more; it has some mystical, emotional and spiritual depth.”

— Will Gompertz

5. “Somehow, those Russian artists were able to reduce everything to nothing in order to expose more than we knew was there. It’s about balance and optics, tension and texture. But more than that, it’s about the unconscious. Art that we like but we don’t quite know why. Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Popova and Lissitzky were brilliant visionaries, the pioneers of the first totally abstract art.”

— Will Gompertz

6. “Rodchenko’s intention was to challenge the belief system that Malevich had instigated around his non-objective art. The Suprematist told the viewer that there was more to his triangles and squares than simply being pleasing pieces of graphic design; that his art contained hidden meaning and universal truths.”

— Will Gompertz

7. “In my experience it is the abstract artists – those who spend their lives stripping away detail to reveal a universal truth – who are the worse offenders when it comes to using flowery, imprecise language to describe their work.”

— Will Gompertz

8. “Picasso is said to have once mused that it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”

— Will Gompertz

9. “His moment of revelation duly arrived; however, for Klee it did not come through music, but through travel. In 1914 he went to Tunis to paint, an experience that changed him and his art.”

— Will Gompertz

10. “Could he make a painting as emotional and epic as a Wagner opera? Not with the intention of replicating the maestro’s music, but to produce a parallel experience where colors were the notes and their composition the tonality.”

— Will Gompertz

11. “This is where the fun starts for Mondrian. His compositions are always asymmetrical, as it helped create a sense of movement, which set him the challenge of using his limited palette.”

— Will Gompertz

12. “The person with the paintbrush or sculptor’s chisel was now the dominant figure in the relationship, having thrown down the gauntlet to a newly subordinate and vulnerable viewer, daring us to take a leap of faith. Which remains the case today: abstract art puts us all at risk of looking like suckers, believing in something that isn’t there.”

— Will Gompertz

13. “Paint, for the Impressionists, became a medium whose material properties were being celebrated as opposed to being disguised behind the artifice of a pictorial illusion.”

— Will Gompertz

14. “He considered the medium to be secondary: first and foremost was the idea. Only after an artist had settled on and developed a concept would he or she be in a position to choose a medium, and it should be the one with which the idea could most successfully be expressed. And if that meant using a porcelain urinal, so be it. In essence, art could be anything as long as the artist said so. That was a big idea.”

— Will Gompertz

15. “They weren’t copying real life: they were appropriating it.”

— Will Gompertz

16. “Klee would start a picture with a point and then “take a line for a walk.”

— Will Gompertz

17. “The museum says the information is for the uninitiated visitor, but the truth is that, on occasion, it has been written for a handful of world experts in a language only art insiders would understand.”

— Will Gompertz

18. “Meanwhile, as this confusion was going on, Malevich hoped that deep within the viewer’s psyche their unconscious mind would get a chance to work its magic. And once it had escaped from its rationalist prison, the unconscious mind would be able to “see” that the artist was presenting the entire cosmos, and all life within it, in his small, square, simple painting.”

— Will Gompertz

19. “It’s a urinal! It’s not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object.”

— Will Gompertz

20. “The idea being that although red and green sit opposite one another on the color wheel, when placed adjacently on the canvas they become complementary, in that the red will appear redder, and the green will appear to be greener: they bring the best out in each other.”

— Will Gompertz

21. “As discussed earlier, this approach relies on the viewer believing that the artist is blessed with special talent and insight. But Rodchenko was saying that his Constructivist paintings were not special or transcendental works of art.”

— Will Gompertz

22. “And what are Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, Jeff Koons’s balloon dogs and Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks if not the appropriation of everyday objects by an artist in order to re-present them in a new, artistic context?”

— Will Gompertz

23. “Malevich presented dozens of his Suprematist paintings, with Black Square given pride of place. It was hung near the ceiling, high up in a corner, positioned diagonally across the right angle where the two walls meet. The location was important. It was an allusion to the iconic status Malevich was attributing to the painting, as it is the position in Russian Orthodox homes reserved for religious iconography.”

— Will Gompertz

24. “It is not unknown for the artist to fall into the same trap. I have interviewed brilliant artists who are rightly revered for the intelligence, insight and beauty of their work. And yet, when a microphone is placed under the artist’s nose, all that clarity vanishes. It’s not unusual to find that after listening to half an hour of sub-clauses, qualifications and meandering metaphor one is no nearer to understanding an artist’s work: further away, in fact.”

— Will Gompertz

25. “Suprematism was an audacious concept. At least Kandinsky’s abstract paintings gave the viewer a visual treat, even if they were indecipherable.”

— Will Gompertz

26. “That, he thought, was the essential purpose of art – to capture the universal in the everyday, which was particular to their here and now: the present.”

— Will Gompertz

27. “It is weird when one of those copies is put out on the display to observe people taking the thing so seriously. You see hordes of unsmiling art-worshippers craning their heads around the object, staring at it for ages, standing back, looking at it from all angles. It’s a urinal! It’s not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object.”

— Will Gompertz

28. “Modernism’s constant quest to find a single, all-encompassing solution to humanity’s problems was considered to be silly, naive and delusional by the Postmodernists.”

— Will Gompertz

29. “An artist’s job was not to give aesthetic pleasure – designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves.”

— Will Gompertz

30. “The open-minded, talent-spotting, artist-nurturing Camille Pissarro summed up Van Gogh in one typically compassionate remark: “Many times I’ve said that this man will either go mad or outpace us all. That he would do both, I did not foresee.”

— Will Gompertz

31. “In an unusual alliance in the story of modern art, the artists of Russia were wholeheartedly with the establishment, not against it.”

— Will Gompertz

32. “Remove the clutter, simplify the shape, reduce the color palette and concentrate on the purity of form.”

— Will Gompertz

33. “We’ll be fine’, Pierre-Auguste Renoir said assertively. ‘We are good artist; we know that. Remember what Baudelaire said before he died: “Nothing can be done except little by little.” That is what we are doing, it is not big, but it is something!”

— Will Gompertz

34. “Kandinsky now knew that abstraction was the magic ingredient when it came to making a painting that could stand comparison with a symphony.”

— Will Gompertz

35. “In La Nona Ora Cattelan is playing on people’s belief in God and their acceptance that the Pope is closer to Him than any other living person – a position once held by Jesus. But he is also questioning people’s belief in art, and how it has become a form of worship in a secular society – he is questioning our newfound faith. His cosmic rock crushes an old and a new belief system in one strike.”

— Will Gompertz

36. “If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth story to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.”

— Will Gompertz

37. “The task given to the artists was straightforward: create a visual identity for Communism. The Constructivists accepted the brief and in so doing forever associated avant-garde art with the left.”

— Will Gompertz

38. “Balance, tension and equality was all for Mondrian.”

— Will Gompertz

39. “The deal being that Kandinsky would paint a lovely, vibrant picture in the hope that we would resist the temptation to translate the colors into known objects or themes, but instead allow ourselves to be transported into an imaginary world in much the same way as we would if listening to a piece of music.”

— Will Gompertz