For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing… Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of performance. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult… — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
You don't need everybody to agree with you, but you do need a few people. And by this point I have a fairly high… — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
I have painted enough to have a lot of respect for mediocre painters. It's really hard. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Artists are sometimes in a position to tell the truth, but they're positioned as a Cassandra. They're gifted with impeccable prophecy and the assurance… — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed! — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Everything I've learned about art was (a) because I was actually interested, or (b) I was actually interested in covering my ass because of… — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation. — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it… — Peter Schjeldahl Copy Share Image
