Robert Motherwell - Modern Quotes

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I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting... An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies...

Robert Motherwell
Among other ends, modern art is related to the ideal of Internationalism.

Robert Motherwell
One is to know that art is not national, that to be merely an American or a French artist is to be nothing; to fail to overcome one's initial environment is never to reach the human... Thus when we say one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is.... as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level.

Robert Motherwell
Plastic automatism.... as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions.

Robert Motherwell
A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters.

Robert Motherwell
Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure... No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development.

Robert Motherwell
We must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the 'body-and-mind' as a whole to the events of reality.

Robert Motherwell
Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head.

Robert Motherwell
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Robert Motherwell
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 an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

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

Robert Motherwell