Robert Motherwell Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Self, Deception

  20 Copy quote

• I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

  Robert Motherwell

  Painting, Problem, Abstract

  22 Copy quote

• Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Firsts, Abstract

  8 Copy quote

• For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

  Robert Motherwell

  Mean, Drawing, Secret

  19 Copy quote

• It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size.

  Robert Motherwell

  Power, Different, Size

  4 Copy quote

• It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Encounters, Sometimes

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  7 Copy quote

• I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

  Robert Motherwell

  Anxiety, Abstract Painting, Common

  4 Copy quote

• For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.

  Robert Motherwell

  Book, Years, Twenties

  19 Copy quote

• The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Order, Mind

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  11 Copy quote

• Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Matter, Painting

  "The Times", November 17, 1985.

  11 Copy quote

• It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Feelings, Being Me

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  11 Copy quote

• It is true that every artist has his own religion.

  Robert Motherwell

  Artist

  8 Copy quote

• Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Profound, Innovation

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  15 Copy quote

• For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

  Robert Motherwell

  Everyday, World, Way

  Siri Engberg, Joan Banach, Robert Motherwell, Walker Art Center (2003). “Robert Motherwell: the Complete Prints 1940-1991: Catalogue Raisonne”, p.21, Hudson Hills

  6 Copy quote

• To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

  Robert Motherwell

  Beautiful, Canvas, Empty

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it.

  Robert Motherwell

  Dream, Order, Perception

  8 Copy quote

• An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Reality, Degrees

  7 Copy quote

• One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Appearance, Abstract

  "The Writings of Robert Motherwell".

  7 Copy quote

• Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.

  Robert Motherwell

  Incentives, Poor, Paint

  7 Copy quote

• Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

  Robert Motherwell

  Choices, Painting, Paint

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  7 Copy quote

• To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I.

  Robert Motherwell

  Wine, Labels, Letters

  Robert Motherwell, David Rosand (1997). “Robert Motherwell on paper: drawings, prints, collages”, Harry N Abrams Inc

  8 Copy quote

• In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.

  Robert Motherwell

  Artist, Drawing, Vision

  17 Copy quote

• The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.

  Robert Motherwell

  People, Mountain, Mouths

  4 Copy quote

• In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.

  Robert Motherwell

  Brushes, Oneself

  4 Copy quote

• I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.

  Robert Motherwell

  Opposites, Trying, Painting

  Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, Jack D. Flam, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1983). “Robert Motherwell”, Abbeville Pr

  7 Copy quote

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