Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685-1750)

It's easy to play any musical instrument - all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

Francis Bacon

Flesh and meat are life!  If I paint meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful. . . . We are all meat.

William Bailey

I wanted a painting that was silent and unfolded slowly, that offered a contemplative situation.  [1979]

James Baldwin

Artists are here to disturb the peace. [1961 interview]

James Baldwin

Artists aNot everything that can be faced can be fixed, but nothing can be fixed unless it is faced. [I am not your Negro]

Balthazar Balthus

The best way to begin is to say Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known.  And now let us look at his paintings.
[Balthus insisted that the catalog for his 1968 exhibition at the Tate should contain no biographical matter.]

Banksy

I've learned from experience that a painting isn't finished when you put down your brush--that's when it starts.  The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value.  Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.  [Quoted in NY Times, Feb 18, 2013.]

Muriel Barbery
(born 1969)

What does art do for us?  It gives shape to our emotions.

Charles Baudelaire
(1821 – 1867) 

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Charles Baudelaire

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past.  The new generation should forge a new path.

Charles Baudelaire

A child sees everything in a sense of newness – he is always drunk.  Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

Charles Baudelaire

A man who looks out of an open window never sees as much as a man who looks out of a closed one. 

Stephen Bayley

The strange truth is: too much beauty would be intolerable, an awful world of meticulously cropped lawns and starched linen. If everything were beautiful. . . nothing would be. [The Architectural Review, 2013 ]

Romare Bearden
(1911-1988)

[It was not my] aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda.  [It is to depict] the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.

Romare Bearden

The essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child.

Romare Bearden

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

Romare Bearden

Painting is like a man being in love, an adventure you plunge into without knowing how you will fare.

Sir George Beaumont
(artist, connoisseur, patron of Constable)

A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown.
[Constable protested by putting a violin on lawn to demonstrate that nature was not really so somber.]  

Henry Ward Beecher
(1813-1887)

Every artist dips his brush into his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.  [Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887]

Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)

Everything should be at once surprising and inevitable.

Max Beckmann
(1884-1950)

What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.

Bernard Berenson
(1865-1959)

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

Bernard Berenson

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

John Berger
(born 1926)

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted.  He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.  [Ways of Seeing, 1972]

Yogi Berra

You can observe a lot just by watching.

Ambrose Bierce

PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ron Bieganski

Creativity is the result of creating space, creating light in someone's brain.  [Quoted in LoganSquarist, March 11, 2013]

William Blake
(1757-1827)

If you cannot imagine with the mind’s eye much more than you can see with the mortal eye, you have a very poor imagination indeed.

William Blake

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought
Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat;
For the greater the fool in the pencil more blest,
And when they are drunk they always paint best.

William Blake

Art can never exist without Naked Beauty display'd. 
[On etching of the Laocoon]

William Blake

Energy is eternal delight.

Charles Blanc
(1813-1882)

Line must maintain its preponderance over color or painting will fall to its ruin just as surely as mankind fell through Eve.

Pierre Bonnard
(1867-1947)

One always talks of surrendering to nature.  There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture.

Pierre Bonnard

Draw your pleasure - paint your pleasure - express your pleasure strongly.  [from his diary]

Adolphe-William Bouguereau
(1825-1905)

One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.  [1895]

Louise Bourgeois
(1911-2010)

A work of art doesn't have to be explained. . . If you do not have any feeling about this [work], I cannot explain it to ou.  If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.

Melvyn Bragg
(born 1939)

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

Constantin Brancusi
(1876-1957)

They are imbeciles who call my work abstract; that which they call abstract is most realist, because what is real is not the exterior form but the idea, the essence of things.

Constantin Brancusi

Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work.  I offer you pure joy.  Look at my sculptures until you see them.

Georges Braque
(1882-1963)

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would be irreparable harm . . . If there is no mystery then there is no ‘poetry’.  [To John Richardson 1957]

Georges Braque

The function of art is to disturb.

Georges Braque

The only thing that matters in art is what cannot be explained.

Georges Braque

I am much more interested in achieving unison with nature than in copying it.

Bertolt Brecht

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter. [in 1931]

Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

Degas was right when he said something like ‘You must copy, copy before you are entitled to paint a radish from nature.’  He meant you have to learn from others, from the past. . . You need a sense of culture to cultivate yourself . . .

Henri Cartier-Bresson

To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart.

Andre Breton 

Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought.  It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life. 

Warren Buffet 

You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out.

Lois Bunuel 

A writer or painter cannot change the world.  But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

George Ellis Burchaw
(born 1921) 

A work of art is something of aesthetic importance deliberately created by a human being.

George Ellis Burchaw

An art object is an artifact of aesthetic importance though not necessarily intended to be an art object by its creator.

George Ellis Burchaw
 

Art is the deliberate creation of aesthetic sensations.  A longer definition of art is that it is the conscios, deliberate production of an event or object of beauty (or emotional import) by a human being, employing not only the skill of a craftsman, but, in addition, an element of creativity -- original, inventive, instinctive genius.