Abstract Quote by Pat Steir

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his…

— Richard Diebenkorn

'Abstract' literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference. The…

— Richard Diebenkorn

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was]…

— Willem de Kooning

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which…

— Ben Shahn

The only way to say what abstract is, is to say what it is not.

— Ad Reinhardt

Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

— Eric Maisel

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this…

— Richard Diebenkorn

To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a…

— Alfred North Whitehead

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made…

— Herbert Marcuse

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

— Stephen Dunn

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a…

— Tom G. Palmer

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing…

— Ad Reinhardt