Art Young Quotes

Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.

No day passes that one does not hark back to the personalities and events of yesteryear. (September 17th)

The unhappy mortal is the one who has not all the freedom his nature wants him to have. He starts to soar and then in a little time is jerked suddenly back by the thought of conventional duty. He's like the pigeon that a hunter tosses into the air to attract other pigeons and then yanks down by the string tied to its leg.

Capitalism is an old man gone insane. Terrified and desperate, but still able to fight with a vicious strength, as a last chance he runs amok. Now it is in Spain, as it was in Italy, Germany, and Austria. With no thought of consequences, this monster is on his final rampage to rule or ruin, and to ruin all hope of progress the world over is preferable to a confession of having outlived his time. That is the scene as I see it.

Though I was always curious about political platforms, statesmanship and the campaign issues which agitated the minds of my elders, at this period in my life it was drawing pictures, composition, light and shade, and all that goes with creative work which was my study and main interest. Ideas were secondary in importance. In my thirties, now living in New York City, with time to think things over, and beginning to experience something of the harsh problems which one with a family must encounter merely to exist, I came to the conclusion that this talent of mine ought to be purposeful and that the use I made of it was more important than having been born with it.

the change is at hand-the old order is cracking. It has been said that 'the cure for democracy is more democracy'

So most of us pray not for riches, but for just enough to assure our living in normal comfort and perhaps a little extra for funeral expenses at the end.

A good illustrator may draw from models but knows how to forget them.

I had another year to go when I quit (high) school-but I felt I was getting dumber and dumber each term, and that it would be a waste of time to continue.

In art and literature I am always on the side of the experimentalist and those who break with tradition, knowing full well that there are some rules of art just as truly as there is a law of equilibrium. These rules a real artist picks up as he does the brush, the pencil, or chisel that have come down from antiquity. But a real artist is also a rebel. Tradition, for all its accepted truisms, is the enemy. The fact that a few accepted or basic facts reveal themselves in all art from the primitive to the classical is not more important than that the iconoclast shall have his day. Within the larger truths there are always a lot of other truths that no one sees till the radical dares to investigate and bring them to light. (October 13th)

It seems unbelievable at this distance that we assailed a candidate because he combed his hair the wrong way, but that is a part of the record of mud-slinging in American politics. And I was a participant on the front page of a leading newspaper [The Inter-Ocean].

Usually politics was my theme, varied now and then, on an off day, by some travesty on prevailing fads.

With all my self-consciousness about looks (and it maybe a feminine streak that is said to be in every artist), I have long had a dislike for individuals who judge others by surface aspects, whether it be a matter of clothes regarded as incorrect for the occasion, a spot on a shirt-front, or need of a shave. Keeping up appearances all too often is the concern of persons who have nothing else worth keeping up.

Hardly a day goes by that the problem of duty to myself-versus duty to others does not arise. (September 29th)

With more and more governments, however crude and experimental, dedicated to industrial democracy and universal brotherhood, the era of peace and joy in living will come on earth.