Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on the Truth of Science and the Truth of Art)

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.” — American mystery novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), "Great Thought" (Feb. 19, 1938), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

Quote of the Day (N.C. Wyeth, on ‘Practical’ and ‘Artistic’ Ideals)

“Practical ideals and artistic ideals are as foreign to each other as black is to white. They are of equal value (in their proper places) in their relations to life and living. But if a boy is naturally gifted with the ‘artistic ideal,’ be it in either art, music or writing, he should be guided into it, placed into its atmosphere unhampered by too much practicality; the latter will come from necessity."—American illustrator and painter N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), letter to his father, Andrew Newell Wyeth II, July 30, 1906, in The Wyeths: Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, Second Edition, edited by Betsy James Wyeth (2008)

Wyeth, the patriarch of a great family of painters, knew all too well the tug between practical and artistic ideals. 

As I discussed in this prior post about his death, he was afflicted towards the end of his life with “melancholy and self-doubt over an inability to be taken seriously as a producer of fine paintings rather than of popular commercial art”—illustrations he created for classics by Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Jules Verne for which he is still best known.

In some way, many artists, writers, and musicians who’ve achieved popularity have struggled with the same aspiration for higher achievement that Wyeth did.

(The image accompanying this post is a self-portrait of Wyeth.)

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, Defining ‘Fine Art’)

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” —British art and social critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Two Paths, Lecture II: The Unity of Art, section 54 (1859)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Fr. Jack Welch, on ‘The Catholic Imagination’)

“The Catholic imagination is a thesaurus of metaphors and symbols. The mystery of God requires a kaleidoscope of imagery. God is like a rock, a fortress, a shield, a place of refuge. God is like a mother, a shepherd, a dark night. The psyche finds images for what cannot be fully expressed.” —John Welch, O. Carm. (1939-2025), “Catholic Imagination,” Carmelite Review, Fall 2013-Winter 2014 issue

Quote of the Day (Musician Maurizio Pollini, on Great Art and ‘The Dreams of a Society’)

“I think great art has entirely progressive aspects within it, elements that are somehow outside the detail of the text or even the political opinions of the person who made it. Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms. In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."— Italian pianist and conductor Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024), quoted by Nicholas Wroe, “Maurizio Pollini: A Life in Music,” The Guardian (UK), Dec. 31, 2010

The image of Maurizio Pollini that accompanies this post was taken during a reception in Tokyo on May 17, 2009, by Dundak.

Quote of the Day (Monica Bellucci, on How Maria Callas ‘Created What She Wanted To Be’)

“She [opera singer Maria Callas] created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business. Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle.’ They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”— Italian actress Monica Bellucci quoted by Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Reviving the Aura of a Diva,” The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2023

I had become intrigued by this quote almost two years ago, but it’s come to the forefront of my consciousness now with the release of the Angelina Jolie biopic about Callas, Maria. If anyone understands the artistic creation of illusions in the manner described by Ms. Bellucci, it would have to be Ms. Jolie, I think.

(The image accompanying this post, of Maria Callas in her home in Milan, Italy, was taken in 1957 by Federico Patellani.)

Quote of the Day (Rebecca West, on Art as a Way to ‘Cultivate Annoyance With Inessentials’)

“For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.” —British novelist, biographer, journalist and critic Rebecca West (1892-1983), “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” The New Republic, November 7, 1915

(Photograph of Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde.)

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on Art and Time)

“Art controls time, it always has. From the moment someone first painted a picture, they were stopping time.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Quote of the Day (Steve Tesich, on ‘A Time of Post-Truth and Post-Art’)

“This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art don’t exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown, an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for man to become a human being.”—Oscar-winning Serbian-born American screenwriter (Breaking Away), playwright, and novelist Steve Tesich (1942-1996), interviewed by Dejan Stojanovic, “A Few Moments with Steve Tesich,” Views, April 1992

The image of Steve Tesich accompanying this post was taken in front of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, 1991, by Marko Rakocevic.

Quote of the Day (Robert Henri, on How ‘Art is an Outsider’)

"Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the Earth."— American painter and teacher Robert Henri (1865-1929), The Art Spirit (1923)

Quote of the Day (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on Nature and Art)

“Nature, it seems, must always clash with Art,
And yet, before we know it, both are one;
I too have learned: Their enmity is none,
Since each compels me, and in equal part.”— German man of letters Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), “Nature and Art” (c. 1800; published 1807), translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, in Selected Works (Everyman’s Library, 2000)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—born 275 years ago today in Frankfurt, Germany—was to German literature what William Shakespeare was to England’s and Alexander Pushkin to Russia’s—a titanic figure who decisively influenced its language and literary standing around the world.

But, because of his attitude to nature and art, he was so much more. I think that Goethe might have been the last of the Enlightenment figures who were able to make their marks in multiple fields.

Had he confined his endeavors to literature, Goethe still would have been acclaimed for his versatility in multiple genres: the novel (The Sorrows of Young Werther, a bestseller in 1774), travelogues (Italian Journey), drama (Faust), and assorted poems eventually set to music.

Like Thomas Jefferson—born only six years before—Goethe trained in the law before dabbling in science (he formulated the concept of morphology, a kind of forerunner to Darwin’s theory of evolution) and practicing statecraft (as an aide to Duke Carl August, who later became Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach).

I mentioned that he was an Enlightenment figure, but in another sense, he harked back to the Renaissance who could excel at multiple areas of endeavor. Besides the above activities, Goethe was also a skilled painter and, well into middle age, an enthusiastic athlete.

(For more on Goethe as Renaissance man, see this August 2020 post from the Sarkologist blog.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, using Goethe as a representative of “The Writer” type in his seven lectures on Representative Men (1850), saw him as someone who “in conversation, in calamity…finds new materials” 

Such was his capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command,—he wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical, painter, composer,—all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in it as he. He was not afraid to live.

Quote of the Day (Edwin Arlington Robinson, on ‘Art’s Long Hazard’)

“Unfailing and exuberant all the time,
Having no gold he paid with golden rhyme,
Of older coinage than his old defeat,
A debt that like himself was obsolete
In Art’s long hazard, where no man may choose
Whether he play to win or toil to lose.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), “Caput Mortuum,” in Sonnets, 1889-1927 (1928)

Quote of the Day (Julian Barnes, on the Art Market’s ‘Grifters, Fakers and Thieves’)

“The art market is international and barely regulated; its products are easily transportable, squirrelled away in freeports or swiftly turned into cash. Grifters, fakers and thieves naturally abound. There is often a cosy nexus between artists, dealers, gallerists and critics; value—or at least, price—is constantly moving, usually upwards; and there is an increasing number of very rich people for whom art is a status symbol. Authenticating a work is difficult, and a lot may depend on it. How might a grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson…who charged his employer 25 percent on the sale of any work he had authenticated. Today there are art advisers at the shoulder of new money; the deference might be difficult, but parts of the job must be pretty easy.”— English fiction writer, essayist, and translator Julian Barnes, “Painting Is Terribly Difficult," London Review of Books, Dec. 14, 2023

(Photo of Julian Barnes was taken at HeadRead in 2019, Tallinn, Estonia, May 25, 2019, by WanderingTrad.)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on How Art is Discovered Rather Than Made)

“I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature—to discover it.” —French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Time Regained, Vol. VI of In Search of Lost Time, translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1992)

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, on the Distinction Between Science and Art)

“Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul. Her work is to portray the appearances of things, and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce upon living creatures. The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions. Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with truth of aspect, the other with truth of essence. Art does not represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind. Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man: and it requires of everything which is submitted to it imperatively this, and only this,—what that thing is to the human eyes and human heart, what it has to say to men, and what it can become to them: a field of question just as much vaster than that of science, as the soul is larger than the material creation.”—English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Stones of Venice (1853)

Quote of the Day (W. Somerset Maugham, on Why the Artist Produces)

“The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.” — British man of letters W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), The Summing Up (1938)

Quote of the Day (Simon Schama, on ‘Supremely Accomplished Art’)

“A great deal of supremely accomplished art has been created by artists who have preferred self-effacement to heroic self-dramatization, and who have wanted more modest goals for their work: the imitation of nature, the representation of beauty, or both at the same time.”— English historian Simon Schama, The Power of Art (2006)

(Photograph of Simon Schama at Strand Book Store, New York City. taken August 15, 2006, by David Shankbone)

Quote of the Day (Ward Just, on the Aim of Art and Politics)

“I believe that the aim of art is consolation, and it is the aim of politics as well; the artist and the politician are brothers." —American novelist, short-story writer and journalist Ward Just (1935-2019), Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women (1979)

The accompanying image of Ward Just was taken Sept. 5, 2015 by slowking4.

Quote of the Day (John Ruskin, on the Artist as ‘A Seeing and Feeling Creature’)

"The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record."— English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Stones of Venice (1853)

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on Creating Art)

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt–a wind to freeze;
Sad patience–joyous energies;
Humility–yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity–reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel–Art.” —American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), “Art,” from American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (The Library of America, 1993)