The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort

I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.