Degas is repulsive.

- The New York Times, 1886

Gauguin is… a decorator tainted with insanity.

- Harpers Weekly, 1913

You scarsely know if you are looking at a parcel of nude flesh or a bundle of laundry.

- on Manets “Venus et le chat” in Le Figaro, 1863

Matisse is an unmitigated bore..surely the vogue of those twisted and contorted human figures… must be as short as it is artificial.

- Chicago Tribune 1913

it is the work of a madman.

- Ambroise Vollard, commenting on “Demoiselles d’Avignon” 1907

No intellegence can accept such aberrations.

- Le Figero art critic on Camille Pissarro, 1876

He (Renoir) has no talent at all, that boy…tell him please to give up painting.

- Edouard Manet on Renoir, 1864

Why should Titian and the Venetians be named on a discourse on art? Such idiots are not artists.

- William Blake, 1807

Certainly no man or woman of normal mental health would be attracted by the sadistic, obsene deformations of Cezanne, Modigliani, Matisse, Gauguin and the other Fauves.

- John Hemming Fry, The revolt against beauty,1934

Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted Engish artist, Mr. Rippingille.

- John Hunt (British art critic),1780

The Experts Speak, 1984, Villard Books, New York