Robert Motherwell, quotes on painting art and life in American Abstract Expressionism + biography
The American painter Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1999) with his artist quotes on painting art and biography facts. His sourced quotes illustrate the unique position of Motherwell in Abstract Expressionism / New York School because of the many reflections he made on contemporary American and European art and by initiating many debates in the ‘New York School’. ‘Spanish Elegies’ is a famous series of paintings he made. At the bottom more biography notes and some useful art links for Robert Motherwell. When you enjoy his quotes, please share them on Facebook, Google +1 or Twitter; – the editor.
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Robert Motherwell: ‘Spanish Elegy # 126′, 1965-75 |
Robert Motherwell, his artist quotes by the painter & theoretician in American Abstract Expressionism
- 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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Modern Painter’s World’, Robert Motherwell , Dyn, Nov. 1942, p. 9 ( famous American Abstract Expressionism artist Robert Motherwell, creating painting art in the New York School )
- Plastic automatism… …as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miró, (Both artists in Surrealism, fh) 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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Modern Painter’s World’, Robert Motherwell , Dyn, Nov. 1942, p. 13.
- The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition… …We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- The ‘pure’ red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist… …Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters’ caps, and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we should have no feeling toward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetic’, Robert Motherwell; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 22.
- One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design’ 47, April 1946 p. 15.
- The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent ‘objects’ (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society’s logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist’s path.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- 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. (1946)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 4.
- It is Paul Cézanne‘s feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling…
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world… …The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh’s drama and Seurat’s silent harmony were born in the same country and epoch: but they do not contradict one another; they refer to different patterns among those which constitute reality.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays (1946!, fh) is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality. Like Cubism before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is….
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38- 39.
- Like Rimbaud before them, the Surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa (as Rimbaud did, fh). They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true ‘poetry’ was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47′, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- …one must agree with Rilke when he says that with ‘nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words… .’ It was Marcel Duchamp who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the ‘Mona Lisa’. And so was Mondrian when he dreamt of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture in to a transcendent ensemble.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.
- Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. (1951, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 22.
- process of painting… …is conceived of as an adventure, without preconceived ideas on the part of persons of intelligence, sensibility, and passion. Fidelity to what occurs between oneself and the canvas, no matter how unexpected, becomes central… …the major decisions in the process of painting are on the grounds of truth, not taste…
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The School of New York’, exhibition catalogue Perls Gallery, 1951; as quoted in “New York School – the painters & sculptors of the fifties”, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row Publishers, 1978, p. 46 ( great American Abstract Expressionism artist Robert Motherwell, his inspirational quotations about life & creating paintings; New York School )
- …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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The School of New York’, exhibition catalogue Perls Gallery, 1951; as quoted in “The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties”, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row Publishers, 1978, p. 46.
- Don’t underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters (as his friend William Baziotes, fh) in those days (in a letter to Thomas Hess, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Painting”, Thomas Hess New York, Viking 1951, p. 132.
-…there is a real Dadaism / Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “The Dada Painters and Poets”, Schultz, Wittenborn, New York 1951, p. xiii.
- Here we are at the antipode of automatism (invention from Surrealism, fh) and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation… … (the) excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets… … this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place. (Motherwell is quoting here the comments of Focillon on Japanese legends of accidentalism, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “The Dada Painters and Poets”, Schultz, Wittenborn, New York 1951, p. xxxvii.
- It would be very difficult to formulate a position in which there were no external relations. I can not imagine any structure being defined as though it only has internal meaning.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Modern Artists in America’, First Series, R. Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and B. Karpel eds., 1952; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 40.
- …a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms… (remark in 1951 on the concept of ‘automatic painting / writing’ invented in Surrealism, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 79.
- … for most painters nowadays (1954, fh) 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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The painter and the audience'; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 106.
- 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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The painter and the audience’, 1954; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 107.
- 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.
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The painter and the audience’, 1954; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 108.
- 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…
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘The painter and the audience’, 1954; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, pp. 109-110.
- I take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about. The ‘Spanish Elegies’ (a famous series of paintings of him, fh) are not ‘political’ but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot. They are as eloquent as I could make them. But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111.
- I begin (a painting, fh) from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience,, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it’s not altogether arbitrary what one begins with.. …certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that ‘I am going to paint something I know’ by ‘through the act of painting I’m going to find out exactly how I feel’.
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with David Sylvester, recorded over BBC 22 October 1960; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111.
- In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands ‘too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas ‘dirt’, so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak ‘work in reverse’, and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on…
* source, famous American people life quotes: an interview with David Sylvester, recorded over BBC 22 October 1960; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111.
- I think he (Pollock, fh) responded to rhythm more than anything else in art. Indeed, perhaps it is not to much to assert that his greatest works are marked by the intensity and violence of his rhythm, modified by an incorruptible respect for the work’s flat surface, an art masculine and lyrical and, as in a Celtic dance, measured, despite its original primitive impulse. That he also meant to me, his rhythm ……
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium’, in ‘ARTnews’, Vol. 66, no. 2 April 1967.
- When I was young I was more obsessed with the materiality of things… …today I am more interested in air and atmosphere. This is why I deliberately treat space ambivalently. For example, an orange painting with white lines might be viewed as an orange wall with white lines, but the orange colour is no less atmospheric for all of that. It abounds white light, and the white line vibrate in a deep space, too, as well as an orange ‘wall’. (interview with Irmeline Lebeer, fh)
* source, famous American people life quotes: ‘Recent Work’, Princeton Art Museum, 1973 pp. 10-13; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111.
- I love painting the way one loves the body of a women… …if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need. (a phrase in his statement, read at the Museum of Modern Art)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983 ( great American Abstract Expressionism artist Robert Motherwell, his inspirational quotations about life & creating paintings; New York School )
- When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me. (in conversation with W.C. Seitz)
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 7.
- I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.
* source, famous American people life quotes: “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 94.
- I hung Baziotes’ show with him at Peggy’s (Guggenheim, fh) in 1944. After it was up and we had stood in silence looking at it for a while, I noticed he had turned white… …Suddenly he (Baziotes, fh) looked at me and said: ‘You’re the one I trust; if you tell me the show is no good, I’ll take it right down and cancel it.’… … you see, at the opposite side of the coin of the abstract expressionist’s ambition and of out not giving a damn, was also not knowing whether our pictures were even pictures, let alone whether they were any good…
* source, famous American people life quotes: “William Baziotes – paintings and drawings”, curated by Michael Preble, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2004, p. 18.
unsourced artist quotes by the American painter Robert Motherwell
- His (Pollock’s, fh) principal problem is to discover what his true is. And since painting is his thought’s medium, the resolution must grow out of the painting (process, fh) it self. (comment on Pollock’s exhibition in ‘Art of This Century’, fh, artist quotes, Motherwell )
art links for more biograhy facts of Robert Motherwell
* biography facts of Robert Motherwell – Abstract Expressionism – on Wikipedia
* artist interview with American painter Robert Motherwell, conducted by Paul Cummings, 1971
