Franz Kafka
(1883-1924)

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Leszek Kalakowski

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know we we are.

Frida Kahlo
(1907-1954)

I paint my own reality.  The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

To paint is the most terrific thing there is, but to do it well is difficult. It is necessary to learn the skill very well, to have very strict self-discipline, and above all to have love, to feel a great love for painting.

Wassily Kandinsky
(1866-1944)

We live in a time full of questions and premonitions and omens – hence full of contradictions

Wassily Kandinsky

The starting point is the study of color and its effect on men.
[Concerning the Spiritual in Art]

Wassily Kandinsky

Art has the power to create a spiritual atmosphere.
[Concerning the Spiritual in Art]

Wassily Kandinsky

The artist must not only train his eye but his soul.
[Concerning the Spiritual in Art]

Wassily Kandinsky

Color is the power which directly influences the soul.  Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with the strings.  The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.  [Concerning the Spiritual in Art]

Allan Kaprow
(1927-2006)

Artist refers to a person, willfully enmeshed in a dilemma of categories, who performs as if none of them existed.

John Keats
(1795-1821)

   'Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,' – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.  [Ode on a Grecian Urn]

John Keats

    Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,—
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.   [Ode on a Grecian Urn]

Ellsworth Kelly
(1923-2015)

In a sense, what I've tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.

Edward Kemp
(1871-1891)

To regard a garden as otherwise than a work of art, would tend to a radical perversion of Nature.

Martin Kemp

That “western art” has a history seems self-evident.  It has existed for over 2 ½ millennia, and has undergone a series of transformations.  At one time it seemed reasonably clear what comprised that history . . . [now there is] a radical questioning of the validity of artistic quality as a criterion, of “western” as the standpoint perspective from which the world is to be viewed, and of history as something that tells the story of inexorable progress. . . There is no one way of telling the story which can claim the highest level of validity.

John F. Kennedy

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.  If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Anselm Kiefer
(born 1945)

It's horrible; you're desperate, but the next day it becomes, sometimes, beautiful.  Because I didn't see what was inside.  Desperation is a material for artists.  
[Talking about his work in New York Times, July 9, 2009]

Anselm Kiefer

Art is longing.  You neever arrive but you keep going in the hope that you will.

Anselm Kiefer

Art is something really worth thinking about.  A part of it should always include having to scratch your head.

Roger Kimball

The greatest occupational hazard for an art critic or art historian is to let words come between the viewer and the experience of art - to substitute a verbal encounter for an aesthetic one.  [The Rape of the Masters]

Roger Kimball

The art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art.  For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.  [The New Criterion, July 2007]

Paul Klee

To paint well is simply this: put the right color in the right place. 

Paul Klee

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet. 

Paul Klee

Drawing is like taking a line for a walk. 

Oskar Kokoschka

Expressionism does not live in an ivory tower, it turns to the person standing closest and wakes him up.  
[Edvard Munch's Expressionism, College Art Journal, 1953]

Jeff Koons

When I view the world, I don't think of my own work.  I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.  
[New York Times, Feb 28, 2010]

Hilton Kramer

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation. 
[New York Times art critic in the late 1960s]

Karl Kraus

In cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads. [Die Fackell]

Lawrence M. Krauss

I often tell teachers that the biggest mistake any of them can make is to assume that their students are interested in what they are about to say. Teaching is seduction.

Ernest Kris

Art is not produced in an empty space, no artist is independent of predecessors or models – he, no less than the scientist and the philosopher is part of a specific tradition and works in a structured area
of problems.

Allen Kurzweil
(born 1960)

    The viewer paints the picture, the reader writes the book
The glutton gives the tart its taste and not the pastry cook.
[The Grand Complication, 2001]