Thomas Hart Benton: If you are to enjoy an art, you must first accept its terms

Art is not life, nor a reproduction of life, but a representation carried out within the specific terms, conversions and limitations of the particular art used. Hence, absolute truth, with reference to objective fact, is not to be found in the business. The most realistic art is considerably removed from reality. Art does not give real things or imitations of real things. The thing that art gives is strained first through the artist's selections and judgments, and then through the specific techniques which he used to present them. If you are to enjoy an art, you must first accept its terms.
- Thomas Hart Benton

-purported to have said...
The artist's life is the best life... if you can get through the first forty years.
- Thomas Hart Benton

You can't change your mind up on a scaffold without the risk of everything going awry. You must solve your problems before you get up there.
- Thomas Hart Benton

The Synchromists extended and intensified Cezanne's color-form theories, in which form was seen as a derivative of the organization of color planes, by abandoning completely the usual colors of nature, replacing them with highly saturated spectral colors and extending them into an area of purely 'abstract' form.
- Thomas Hart Benton

Modern French painting is all right; it has produced many beautiful and interesting things, fully worthy of admiration, but it has also set up response habits among our artistic authorities which have worked against a free approach to other artistic forms.
- Thomas Hart Benton

I paint every day. Sometimes I hate painting, but I keep at it, thinking always that before I croak I'll really learn how to do it – maybe as well as some of the old painters.
- Thomas Hart Benton

I have a sort of inner conviction that for all the possible limitations of my mind and the disturbing effects of my processes, for all the contradicting struggles and failures I have gone through, I have come to something that is in the image of America and the American people of my time.
- Thomas Hart Benton

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