Robert Gottlieb Art Quotations

There's no point pretending that all of Martha Graham's pieces are equally strong.

City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis.

How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance.

Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater.

It was a basic story -- three or four or five girls start off together, one finds love, one goes crazy and/or dies, and one of them becomes a huge success -- but Rona's take was very up-to-date. What made it work for the time was that it had a fresh young-career-women-in-New York quality with a fillip of shock.

Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.

Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love.

'Empty Moves' is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning.

What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.

Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.

The early giants of modern dance - Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis - barely left traces of their art.

How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.