Lee Hall

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

Alexander Hamilton

I never expect a perfect work from an imperfect man. 

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.

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]

Ronald Harwood

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

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]

William Hazlitt

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

Barbara Hepworth
(1903-1975)

It's lovely to pick up a stone, and it's lovely to live with sculpture, because it changes in every possible light, all through the day, moonlight, artificial light - it's always changing. [Interview with TateShots]

Barbara Hepworth

Everything I make is to touch, and people usually do, which pleases me.  The real thing is to make them move with their bodies.  
[Interview with TateShots]

Barbara Hepworth

I, the sculptor am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the trust and the contour.

Michael Heizer
(born 1944)

Everything is beautiful but not everything is art.  What makes it art?  I guess if you insist on it long enough, when you convince someone else it is.  I think the look of art is broadening.  I think the only important limitations on art are the ones imposed or accepted by the artist himself.

Robert Henri
(1865-1929)

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

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

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

I am interested in art as a means of living a life, not as a means of making a living.

Robert Henri

A curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.

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]

Eva Hesse

Don't ask what the work is, rather see what the work does.  

Dave Hickey
(born 1939)

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.

Damien Hirst
(born 1965)

I don't believe in genius.  I believe in freedom.  Anyone can be like Rembrandt.  With practice you can make great paintings. [2009]

Damien Hirst

I want to make art, create objects that will have meaning forever. [2012]

Damien Hirst

Making art, good art, is always a struggle.  It can make you happy when you pull it off.  There's no better feeling.  It's beauteous.  But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.
[March 2012]

Damien Hirst

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.  
[1995 acceptance speech for winning the Turner Prize]

Damien Hirst

It's like, if you say "sell your Hirst".  I say "don't sell your Hirsts, hang onto them."  If you look at the numbers. . . It's always healthy to have both views - people love it, people hate it.  I once said as long as they spell my name right I don't mind.  As I've got older I don't really mind if they spell my name right either.  [quoted by Reuters April 2, 2012]

Scott Hocking

You don't have to make artwork to be on a pedestal. It doesn't have to be owned. It can be about the feeling you get when you walk into a room. [ModelD, interview March 2021]

David Hockney

The world is very beautiful but human beings are quite mad. [Art Newspaper, Sept. 2021

Jim Hodges
(born 1957)

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.  
[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

If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

Edward Hopper

American art should be weaned from its French mother.

Elbert Hubbard
(1856-1915)

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Douglas Huebler
(1924-1997)

The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.
[Statement presented as a conceptual artwork in a 1969 exhibition]

Robert Hughes
(born 1938)

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]

Robert Hughes

One of the ways you measure the character - the greatness - of a country is by its public commitment to the arts.  Not as a luxury, not as a diplomatic device, not as a social placebo.  But as a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature, without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished, and denied, and our sense of community with other citizens weakwned.  [New Yorker, May 27, 1966]

Aldous Huxley

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