Art: Aphorisms for Everybody

¶ “Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.”—Paul Gauguin.

¶ “Immortality in art is a disgrace.”—F. T. Marinetti.

¶ “Art happens—no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.”—James A. McN. Whistler.

¶ “The artist is a selfish person whom we like, and the philanthropist an unselfish person whom we do not like.”—:A. Clutton-Brock.

¶ “If more than 10% of the population likes a picture, it should be burned, for it must be bad.”—G. Bernard Shaw.

¶ “. . . The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.”—Pablo Picasso.

¶ “I hate all Boets and Bainters.”—George I of England.

For collectors of art—and of quotation marks—a critic-collector-connoisseur of modern art has compiled a booklet of such pungent, provocative aphorisms: Of Art—Plato to Picasso (Wittenborn; $1.50), published last week. Compiler Albert Eugene Gallatin, a painter himself, knows well the vicissitudes of collecting. His own famed “Museum of Living Art” is one of the finest collections of 20th-century art in the U.S.