Robert Motherwell

If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he…

— 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

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

— Robert Motherwell

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

— 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

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way…

— Robert Motherwell

If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks-but never three.

— 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

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

— Robert Motherwell

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

— 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

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze…

— Robert Motherwell

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

— Robert Motherwell

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

— 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

By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing - or word processing, as it's known to…

— Robert Motherwell

If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.

— Robert Motherwell

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

— 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

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

— Robert Motherwell