Piet Mondrian Quotes

33 quotes in 405 categories

• The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
• The more basic the color, the more inward, the more pure.
• Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.
• Intellect confuses intuition.
• All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line…
• The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.
• I think you too recognize the important relationship between philosophy and art, and it is just this relationship that most painters deny. The great masters…
• The only problem in art is to achieve a balance between subjective and objective.
• I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
• The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the picture.
• To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.
• I don't want pictures, I want to find things out.
• By the unification of architecture, sculpture and painting a new plastic reality will be created.
• The surface of things gives enjoyment, their interiority gives life.
• This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its…
• Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.
• The essence of painting has actually always been to make it [the universal] plastically perceptible through colour and line.
• Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that…
• Observing sea, sky and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity of crossing verticals and horizontals. Impressed by the vastness of…
• The colored planes, as much by position and dimension as by the greater value given to color, plastically express only relationships and not forms.

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