Robert Motherwell - Painters Quotes

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Don't underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters [like his artist-friends William Baziotes and Roberto Matta] in those days.

Robert Motherwell
.. there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade.

Robert Motherwell
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
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

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
For most painters nowadays [1954] examination is self-examination – this is all that we are accustomed to – while the relation to the audience is a social matter. And it is our pictures, not ourselves, that live the social life and meet the public.

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

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
For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

Robert Motherwell