Artist Quotes by Robert Motherwell

It is true that every artist has his own religion.

— Robert Motherwell

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

— Robert Motherwell

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

— Robert Motherwell

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

— Robert Motherwell

Art is an experience, not an object.

— Robert Motherwell

Each brushstroke is a decision.

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

— Robert Motherwell

It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing…

— Robert Motherwell

Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image…

— Robert Motherwell

I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my…

— Robert Motherwell

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

— Robert Motherwell

In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is…

— Robert Motherwell

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to…

— Robert Motherwell

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends…

— Robert Motherwell

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it -…

— Robert Motherwell

Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound,…

— Robert Motherwell

In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the…

— Robert Motherwell

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments…

— Robert Motherwell

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art:…

— Robert Motherwell

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much…

— Robert Motherwell

A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers…

— Robert Motherwell

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. Robert Motherwell Every man becomes, to a certain…

— Robert Motherwell

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

— Robert Motherwell

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he…

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

— Robert Motherwell