Johann Sebastian Bach

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]

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.]

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.

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.]  

Beethoven

  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

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

John Berger

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.

William Blake

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

Energy is eternal delight.

Charles Blanc

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

Adolphe-William Bouguereau

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)

Melvin Bragg

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

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

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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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 . . .

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. 

Lois Bunuel 

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