Robert Motherwell Quotes

54 quotes in 695 categories

• 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…
• In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
• Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
• One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.
• Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both…
• Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its…
• 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.…
• In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize…
• Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
• The main thing is not to be dead.
• Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation
• To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
• Art is an experience, not an object.
• It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.
• It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
• If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
• For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
• I feel most real to myself in the studio.
• Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.
• Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

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