One thing you can say about most New Zealand artists, they are generally supportive of one another. Ok you may hear the odd snipe - we remember Toss Woollaston calling Elizabeth Kelly “Pond Cream Kelly” because that's what he thought she painted with - but elsewhere artist-to-artist insults are in a whole different league
“Jackson Pollock’s paintings might be very pretty but they’re just decoration. I always think they look like old lace.”
Francis Bacon
“He finished modern art at one blow by outuglying, alone, in a single day, the ugly that all others combined turned out in several years.”
Dali on Picasso
“It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.”
Chagall on Picasso
"This man has come into the world to destroy painting.”
Poussin on Caravaggio
“Cézanne is a catastrophe of awkwardness.”
Dali
"I’d rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.”
Frida Kahlo on the Surrealists in general
“The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.”
Beuys
“He bores me.”
Renoir on da Vinci
“Oh, I think he’s great. He makes such great lunches.”
Warhol on Jasper Johns
Source: list via flavorwire, you can read more here
