Lee Hall

Culture is for the living, and art should be about taking part.  [Introduction to The Pitman Painters] 

Mardsen Hartley

I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance. . . I had rather be intellectually right than emotionally exuberant.

Ronald Harwood

Only tyrannies understand the power of art.
 [Wilhelm Furtwängler in Harwood's play Taking Sides]

Robert Harrison

While it is true that we speak with the words of the dead, it is equally true that the dead speak in and through the voices of the living - - - we lend voice to the dead so that they may speak to us from their underworld - address us, instruct us, reprove us, bless us, enlighten us, and in general alleviate the historical terror and loneliness of being in the world. 
[The Dominion of the Dead, 2003]

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nobody . . . ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.       [The Marble Faun]

Robert Henri

Participate in life and draw or paint what you participate in.

Robert Henri

After all the goal is not making art.  It is living a life.  Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.  Art is a result.  It is the trace of those who have led their lives.  [The Art Spirit, 1923]

Robert Henri

Paint what you feel.  Paint what you see.  Paint what is real to you.  
[The Art Spirit, 1923]

Robert Henri

The object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.  [The Art Spirit, 1923]

Robert Henri

Art when properly understood is the province of every human being.  It is simply a question of doing things, anything well.  [The Art Spirit, 1923]

Robert Henri

Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he [the artist] opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.   
[The Art Spirit, 1923]

Robert Henri

Through art mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men.  [The Art Spirit, 1923]

Robert Henri

The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the art.  
[The Art Spirit, 1923]

Dave Hickey

The cultural world is divided between those people who look at Raphael as if it's graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it's Raphael and I prefer the latter.

Jim Hodges

I like that people say “I can do that.”  That’s part of the message - yes, you can do that.

Build houses whose exterior is at one with their interior.

Joseph Hoffman and Koloman Mosser

So long as our cities, our houses, our rooms, our furniture, our effects, our clothes and our jewelry, so long as our language and feelings fail to reflect the spirit of our times in a plain, simple and baeutiful way, we shall be infinitely behind our ancestors.  [In the Manifesto of the Weiner Werkstatte, 1905]

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Of course the eternal effort in art, even of the art of writing legal decisions, is to omit all but the essentials.  [Letter to Frankfurter, 1915]

Ana Finel Honigman

Science is full of instances in which scientists began experiments with one intention but then accidentally produced something entirely different whose character has greatly contributed to society. Art should be no different - what is heard and seen is as valid as what is intended to be said, and what is created.  [Blog in The Guardian, 26 Jan 2007]

Edward Hopper

American art should be weaned from its French mother.

Robert Hughes

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures.
[Lecture at Royal Academy, 2004]

Aldous Huxley

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is
experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.