David W. Galenson
(born 1951)

Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors. [Artistic Capital, 2006]

Paul Gauguin
(1848-1903)

Don't sweat over a painting, a great sensation can be rendered immediately.  Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.Art is an abstraction as you dream amid nature.

Paul Gauguin

I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.

Paul Gauguin

Art is an abstraction as you dream amid nature.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
(1777-1855)

Jean-Léon Gérôme
(1824-1904)

How can the government dare welcome such a collection of inanities into a museum?  Why, have you seen the collection?  The state the ward of such junk!  The Luxembourg Museum is a school.  What lessons are our young artists going to receive there from now on?  They'll all start to do Impressionism!  [Writing in L'Eclair about Caillebotte's bequest to the French nation, 1894]

André Gide
(1869-1951)

Nature is fun to study, but style is everything.Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Charles Gleyre
(1808-1874)

Nature is fun to study, but style is everything.

Johann Wolgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

Goethe

Everyone hears only what he understands.

Goethe

The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.

Goethe

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life.

Vincent van Gogh
(1853-1890)

Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more.  Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her.  If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere. [Letter to Theo 1873]

Vincent van Gogh

I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
[Letter to his brother Theo, Letter 533, Arles, 8 September 1888]

Vincent van Gogh

To paint nature you must be in it a long time.  [Letter June 25, 1889]

Vincent van Gogh

I'd rather die of passion than boredom.

E. H. Gombrich
(1909-2001)

Art does not copy nature – it suggests it.

Edmond de Goncourt
(1882-1896)

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Antony Gormley
(born 1950)

It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.  
[The Guardian, June 23, 2007]

Clement Greenberg
(1909-1994)

The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

Pope Gregory I
(about 540-604)

To adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another . . . what scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant.