Jacques-Louis David
(1748-1825)

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this – and only this – is to be an artist.

Miles Davis

A painting is music you can see and music is a ptg you can hear.
[quoted in ARTnews April 2010]

Stuart Davis

Jazz always plays a part in my inspiration, because I always think of it as art, and think well if they can do it, maybe I can too.  Only I’m making a painting.

Giorgio de Chirico

To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits; logic and common sense will only interfere.

Degas

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Degas

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

Willem de Kooning

I like a nice, juicy, greasy surface.

Delacroix

What creates men of genius - or, rather, what they themselves create - is not new ideas.  It is the obsessive notion that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Jeremy Deller 
 (2004 Turner Prize
  winner)

Art isn't about what you make but what you make happen.

Maurice Denis
 (1870-1943)

Before a picture is a war horse, a female nude or some anecdote it is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.  (from Art et Critique 1890)

Maurice Denis

Art is when things appear rounded.

Andre Derain

I'd like to study the drawings of kids.  That's where the truth is, without a doubt.

Nicolette Devas

The sitter must give himself over to the artist and offer him the freedom to research into his hidden secret character, so that while the brush explores the nostril it also describes the soul.  
(from Two Flamboyant Fathers, 1966)

Thomas Dewar

Minds are like parachutes.  They only function when open.

Diderot

You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his. (Salons)

Arthur Dove

I would like to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, that does not have to be explained like the letter A, for instance.

Jean Dubuffet

The real function of art is to change mental patterns . . . making new thought possible.

Marcel Duchamp

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.

Marcel Duchamp

I'm not at all sure that the concept of the ready-made isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.

Marcel Duchamp

I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

P. Duncum

Art opens doors; equally it establishes the doorframe.  (1951)