Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard

Aphorism #94

You don’t know nothing.

Yogi Berra said that too, about baseball, but I’ll say it about art.

The Impressionists taught us to look, not to think, and to paint what we see, not what we know is there. They looked and they saw spots of color, and that attitude, and those spots of color, led to Post-Impressionism, which led to Cézanne and Cubism, and Cubism revolutionized painting.

So, no sooner did art get truly realistic than it rushed headlong into abstraction. Who knew?

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