The potato seems like a Romantic (organic) object.... you can watch it growing if you don't eat it. It is going to change – grow, rot, disappear. A pebble is like a Classical thing – it changes little if any... If it was big you could keep the dead down with it.... The Classical idea is not around much anymore.

Comparing the Potatoes of Vincent Van Gogh to the Pebbles of Jean Arp. Artist Club, 22 February 1952, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 102