10 Quotes by Robert Motherwell about art



  • Author Robert Motherwell
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    Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

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  • Author Robert Motherwell
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    One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

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  • Author Robert Motherwell
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    A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem.

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  • Author Robert Motherwell
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    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.

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

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  • Author Robert Motherwell
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    For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

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  • Author Robert Motherwell
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    Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

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