Robert Motherwell Short Quotes

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When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me.

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

Robert Motherwell
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

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

Robert Motherwell
One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again.

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

Robert Motherwell
One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.

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

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

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
.. 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
Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Robert Motherwell
The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?

Robert Motherwell
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 own content.

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
I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.

Robert Motherwell
In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted.

Robert Motherwell
It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic.

Robert Motherwell
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
It would be very difficult to formulate a position in which there were no external relations. I cannot imagine any structure being defined as though it only has internal meaning.

Robert Motherwell
.. no true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began,... it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one's own style.

Robert Motherwell