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FAMOUS FEMALE ARTISTS quotes, by great woman painters / and sculptors; on modern art and paintings, including life history facts and biography

Here are presented famous modern woman artists and female painters sculptors in biography notes and a selection of their quotes on modern art:
Helen Frankenthaler, Barbara Hepworth, Frida (Frieda) Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Paula Modersohn Becker, Gabriele Munter, Marianne Werefkin: For more quotes of the woman artists; follow the quotes-links.

ed: Fons Heijnsbroek

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HELEN FRANKENTHALER, with 27 art & life quotes; great American woman painter artist, famous for her soak technique

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (1928 - 2011) was one of the most famous American modern woman artists in Abstract Expressionism. Her art quotes tell us a lot about painting in her typical soak method and her relations with contemporary painters like the both Pollock’s and Greenberg; her quotes give moreover essential biography facts about her life as woman painter in New York. Frankenhaler was a woman painter in American Abstract Expressionism / New York School of the 2nd generation and attributed by art critic Greenberg to early Color Field painting because of her flat way of painting technique. Most famous painting of her is ‘Mountains and sea’.


HELEN FRANKENTHALER with a small selection of her art and life quotes: click for all her 27 collected quotes

a selection of her quotes:

- I still, when I judge my own pictures (either while I’m working or after I think it’s finished) determine if they work in a certain kind of space through shape or color. I think all totally abstract pictures – the best ones that really come off – Newman , Pollock , Noland – have tremendous space; perspective space despite the emphasis on flat surface. For example, in Noland a band of yellow in relation to a band of blue and one of orange can move in depth although they are married to the surface. This has become a familiar explanation, but few people really see and feel it that way…. …In my work, because of color and shape a lot is read in the landscape sense….
* Helen Frankenthaler, modern woman artist quotes on art & paintings: ‘Interview with Helen Frankenthaler’, Henry Geldzahler; ’Artforum’ 4. no. 2, October 1965, p. 37 (quote, American famous woman painter Helen Frankenthaler


- Sometimes I think the worst thing is the current ‘worldliness’ of the whole (art, fh) scene. It is the most deceptive, corrupting, transient thing, full of kicks and fun but so little to do with what it’s all really about… …It has to do with our time, a desperate pact about the power of immediate-in-ness. But I feel less and less concerned with this as an issue. So what? No threat.
* source of her modern woman artist quotes on art & paintings: ‘Interview with Helen Frankenthaler’, Henry Geldzahler; ’Artforum’ 4. no. 2, October 1965, pp. 37-38 (quote, American famous woman painter Helen Frankenthaler


- When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is… …It is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal, Signature’… …’Gesture’ must appear out of necessity, not habit.
* source of her modernwoman artist quotes on art & paintings: ‘An interview with Helen Frankenthaler’ Geldzahler, ‘The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties’ Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 67 (quote, American famous woman painter Helen Frankenthaler


- A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it - well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that - there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.
* source of her modernwoman artist quotes on art & paintings: ”Frankenthaler”, Barbara Rose, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, p. 85 (quote, American famous woman painter Helen Frankenthaler


- After the first day there (In 1961, at the invitation of Tatyana Grosman, Frankenthaler ventured out to Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Grosman’s Long Island printmaking studio, and began making lithographs, Deborah Wye) I felt no hesitation. I was very committed. All I had to do was start work on that print. It was a whole new road -and a very connected road.
* source of her modern woman artist quotes on art & paintings: “Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York”, Deborah Wye, The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 146; http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69050 (quote, American famous woman painter Helen Frankenthaler


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BARBARA HEPWORTH, with 38 of her art & life quotes; great English female sculptor artist in English modern abstract art, famous for her ‘Ovals’

BARBARA HEPWORTH (1903 - 1975), the English woman sculptor - creating her abstract sculptures in English Modernism - is famous for being one of the first sculptors in modern art who started piercing the stone, like also Henry Mooredid and some other sculptors. Hepworth is famous for her many abstract ‘Ovals’, mainly stone sculptures she made by piercing the stone and creating an interior and an exterior, two spatial dimensions in one sculpture. All her life Hepworth kept fascinated by the oval or ovoid shapes.

BARBARA HEPWORTH with a small selection of her art and life quotes: click for 38 of her collected quotes

a selection of her quotes:

- Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back to the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.
* source of her quotes on modern sculpture art works and life ‘Studio International 171’ - June 1966, p. 280 (quote, English famous woman sculptor artist Barbara Hepworth


- The Acropolis – the spaces between the columns – the depth of flutings to touch – the breadth, weight and volume – the magnificence of a single marble bole up-ended -. The passionate warm colour of the marble and all-pervading philosophic proportion and space.
* source of her quotes on modern sculpture art works and life “Barbara Hepworth, ‘Greek diary”; J.P Hodin, European Critic; London: Corby, Adams and MacKay, 1965 (quote, English famous woman sculptor artist Barbara Hepworth


- Ascended Kynthos alone, the cave of Apollo – half-way magnificent and majestic. A pool with fine fig trees nearby full of giant (sacred?) toads – leaping and barking. Also green frogs.
* source of her quotes on modern sculpture art works and life “Barbara Hepworth, ‘Greek diary”; J.P Hodin, European Critic; London: Corby, Adams and MacKay, 1965 (quote, English famous woman sculptor artist Barbara Hepworth


- Saw a magnificent Koros – tall, fierce and passionate bigger than life size – in the Museum. A heavenly work – the backs and buttocks in relation to the hip and waist – an inspiration. I thought the fragment of leg and calf (attached below the knee) was falsely attributed.
* source of her quotes on modern sculpture art works and life “Barbara Hepworth, ‘Greek diary”; J.P Hodin, European Critic; London: Corby, Adams and MacKay, 1965 (quote, English famous woman sculptor artist Barbara Hepworth


- All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the forms. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of foulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.
* source of her quotes on sculpture art works and life “Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography”, New York, Praeger Publishers, 1970, p. 280 (quote, English famous woman sculptor artist Barbara Hepworth


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FRIDA (FRIEDA) KAHLO, with a selection of 20 art quotes by the famous Mexican woman artist and great female painter of many portraits and self-portaits in personal surrealism style

FRIDA KAHLO (Frieda; 1907 – 1954) in her quotes; the Mexican woman painter with her auto-biography in quotes:on her painting art, the many self-portraits and her life with Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican mural painter; Frida created very personal surrealistic artworks. Many of her paintings express her emotional situation of the moment or the way she liked to present herself to others

( click for 20 art quotes by the Mexican woman artist, Frida Kahlo)


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LEE KRASNER, with a selection of 28 art quotes by the famous American woman artist and great female painter in modern Abstract Expressionism

LEE KRASNER with some of her art quotes on painting art and life as a female painter in American Abstract Expressionism; Krasner was married with Jackson Pollock till his death in 1956 – and they influenced each other a lot. Her quotes describe very accurate her typical shifts and changes she made during the years, in creating her painting art.

( click for 28 art quotes by the American woman artist, Lee Krasner)

a selection of her quotes:

- My studio was hung with a series of black and white drawings I had done. I hated them and started to pull them off the wall and tear them and throw them on the floor and pretty soon the whole floor was covered with them. Then another morning I walked in and saw a lot of things there that began to interest me. I began picking up torn pieces of my own drawings and re-gluing them. Them I started cutting up some of my oil paintings. I got something going there and I start pulling out a lot of raw canvas and slashing it as well. That’s how I started my collaging and the tail end of it was the collaging of the paintings in the Betty Parsons show (she had this show around 1951 and later collaged these paintings around 1954/55, fh)… …They (the collages, fh) also have that vertically. Vertically comes back in my work again and again but it comes back in forms that are not exactly as pure. If we use that word vertical with the meaning it has now taken on – the ‘vertical’ doesn’t interest me. It is too pure, and purity given to me in that form makes me nervous.
* source, famous modern American female artists quotes: “Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists”, Cindy Nemser, 1975, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1995, p. 81 (quote, American woman painter Lee Krasner)


- I think for every level you go higher, you slip down one or two levels, and then come back up again. When I say slip back, I don’t mean that detrimentally. I think it is like the swing of a pendulum rather than better or back, assuming that back means going down. If you think of it in terms of time, in relation to past, present, and future, and think of them all as one an oneness, you will find that you swing the pendulum constantly to be with now. Part of it becomes past and the other is projection but it has got to become one to be now. I think there is an order but it isn’t good, better, best.
* source, famous modern American female artists quotes: “Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists”, Cindy Nemser, 1975, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1995, p. 83 (quote, American famous woman artist Lee Krasner)


- In July ’56 there was another break in the work. There is a painting called ‘Prophecy’ which I did just before I left for Europe. Every time the work broke, it sent me into a tailspin because I couldn’t tell what was happening. I asked Jackson (Pollock, fh) to come and look at this painting and he did and said I needn’t be nervous about it. He thought it was a good painting and the only thing that he objected to was this image in the upper right hand which I had scratched in with the back of a brush. It made a kind of an eye form. He advised me to take it out. I said that I didn’t agree with him and left it in… …it is the change that I had to get used to and accept. It frightened me… …it frightened me, particularly because it happened just before I left for Europe. Jackson looked at it, said what he said, and I went off to Europe. Jackson was killed in the automobile accident (1956, fh) while I was there and when I came back I had to confront myself with this painting before I was able to start again. I went through a rough period in that confrontation… …’Prophecy’ was painted before Jackson died and these (a series of paintings in the spirit of ‘Prophecy’, fh) were the first to appear afterwards. As you can see the eye is really coming through now. That’s why I wanted to mention it in relation to ‘Prophecy’.
* source, famous modern American female artists quotes: “Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists”, Cindy Nemser, 1975, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1995, pp. 83 (quote, American famous woman artist Lee Krasner)


- Most of it occurs a great deal without my consciously knowing it. In other words, it is there and I see it and recognize it. So all right, I get a bird image. I get a floral image. But I don’t go around consciously thinking these images up. They come through. So in that sense, it’s archetypal.
* source, famous modern American female artists quotes: “Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists”, Cindy Nemser, 1975, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1995, p. 89 (quote, American famous woman artist Lee Krasner)


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JOAN MITCHELL, with some of her art quotes by the American woman artist and great female painter in Abstract Expressionism, in the second generation

JOAN MITCHELL, the American woman artist with some of her quotes on painting art and life. Mitchell worked as young female painter in American Abstract Expressionism in New York; later she moved - after a few temporary stays - definitely to France in the 1950′s. Mitchell was strongly attracted by the art of the French painter Claude Monet.

( click for all the collected quotes by the woman artist, Joan Mitchell )

a selection of her quotes:
- I am trying to achieve anything I can (in painting, fh). I don’t set out to achieve a specific thing, perhaps to catch motion or to catch a feeling. Call it layer painting, gestural painting, easel painting or whatever you want. I paint oil on canvas – without an easel. Conventional methods. I do not condense things. I try to eliminate clichés, extraneous material. I try to make it exact. My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more like a poem.
* source of famous American / French female painter quotes: ‘Conversations with Joan Mitchell’, Yves Michaud, 1986; as quoted in ‘Joan Mitchell: New Paintings’, ed. Xavier Fourcade, New York 1986, n.p. (quote, modern abstract woman artist Joan Mitchell)


- It seems very clear what it (the painting, fh) means. I can’t say it, but the painting makes it clear. If I don’t know, then it’s not working. If it seems right to me, then it has a meaning, but I can’t tell you what meaning. I can’t be more specific than that. It works when it means something, when I don’t question it any more.
* source of famous American / French female painter quotes: ‘Conversations with Joan Mitchell’, Yves Michaud, 1986; as quoted in ‘Joan Mitchell: New Paintings’, ed. Xavier Fourcade, New York 1986, n.p. (quote, modern abstract woman artist Joan Mitchell)


- I think any involvement of any kind is to forget not being alive. Painting is one of those things. I am alive, we are alive, we are not aware of what is coming next. I am afraid of death. Abandonment is death also. I mean: somebody leaves and other people also leave. I never say goodbye to people….
* source of famous American / French people life quotes: ‘Conversations with Joan Mitchell’, Yves Michaud, 1986; as quoted in ‘Joan Mitchell: New Paintings’, ed. Xavier Fourcade, New York 1986, n.p. (quote, modern abstract woman artist Joan Mitchell)


- Sometimes I don’t know what to do with it (the painting, fh). Sometimes I don’t know exactly what I want. I cheque it out, recheque it for days or weeks. Sometimes there is more to do on it. Sometimes I am afraid of ruining what I have. Sometimes I am lazy, I don’t finish it or I don’t push it far enough. Sometimes I think it’s a painting.
* source of famous American / French female painter quotes: ‘Conversations with Joan Mitchell’, Yves Michaud, 1986; as quoted in ‘Joan Mitchell: New Paintings’, ed. Xavier Fourcade, New York 1986, n.p. (quote, modern abstract woman artist Joan Mitchell)


- I don’t always connect the painting with me, with that person I hear on the tape, although the ideas are familiar. I imagine a sort of scaffolding made of painting stretchers around a lot of colored chaos as an identity. I am an outsider, I happen to live in France (Joan Mitchell was first an American Abstract Expressionist woman artist in New York, fh), I am an alien. So for my identity I need to know where I am, to look at maps. I want to know where the north is, and Vétheuil, and New York, and what street I am on.
* source of famous American / French female painter quotes: ‘Conversations with Joan Mitchell’, Yves Michaud, 1986; as quoted in ‘Joan Mitchell: New Paintings’, ed. Xavier Fourcade, New York 1986, n.p. (quote, modern abstract woman artist Joan Mitchell)


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PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER, with some of her art quotes by the German woman artist; female painter in early Expressionism; Worpswede

PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER, the German woman painter with some of her art quotes on her painting art created with expressive power and in strong colored forms. Her quotes and her letters illustrate the development as young woman artist from Impressionism towards a personal, intuitive early Expressionism. In North Germany Paula Modersohn-Becker started landscape painting and portraits; later in Paris her colors became more bright.

( click for all the collected quotes by the German woman artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker )

a selection of her quotes:
- I’ve made use of the beautiful weather to sketch and paint outside. I had been staying away from color for such a long time that it had become something quite foreign to me. Working in color was always a great joy to me. And now it is a great joy again. Still, I have to battle with it, wrestle with it, with all my strength. And one must be victorious. But if it weren’t for the fight, all the beauty of it wouldn’t exist at all, would it? I’m writing this mostly for Mother who, I believe, thinks my whole life is one constant act of egoistic ecstasy. But devotion to art also involves something unselfish.
* source of famous German woman artists quotes: a letter to her parents, Worpswede, 10 September 1899; as quoted in ‘Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists’; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 199 (quote on painting, great German woman artist Paula Modersohn-Becker


- …I’m going through a strange period now. Maybe the most serious of all my short life. I can see that my goals are becoming more and more remote from those of the family, and that you and they will be less and less inclined to approve of them… …And still I must go on. I must not retreat. I struggle forward, just as all of you do, but I’m doing it within my own mind, my own skin, and in the way I think is right. I’m little frightened by my loneliness in my unguarded hours. But personally those are the very hours that help me along toward my goal. You needn’t show this letter to our parents.
* source of famous German woman artists quotes: a letter to her sister Milly, Worpswede, 21 September 1899; as quoted in ‘Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists’; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 199 (quote on painting, great German woman painter Paula Modersohn-Becker


- My art is going well. I have a feeling of satisfaction about it. Afternoons I stroll around the city (Paris, fh) taking a good look at everything and trying to absorb it all… …I went back to the Notre Dame again. Such wonderful Gothic detailing, those monstrous gargoyles, each one with its own character and face… …Directly behind Notre Dame, almost encircled by the Seine, lies the morgue. Day after day they fish corpses from the river here, people who don’t want to get on living.
* source of famous German female artists quotes: a letter to her sister Milly, Paris, 29 February 1900; as quoted in ‘Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists’; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 200 (quote on painting, great German woman painter Paula Modersohn-Becker


- Please let your “hot-blooded iconoclasm” slumber a bit longer, and for a while permit me simply to be your Madonna. It’s meant to be for your own good, do you believe that? Keep your mind on art, our gracious muse, dear. Let us both plan to paint all this week. And then early Saturday I shall come to you.
* source of famous German female artists quotes: from a letter to her husband Otto Modersohn, after 12 September 1900; as quoted in ‘Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists’; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 200 (quote on painting, great German woman painter artist Paula Modersohn-Becker


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GABRIELE MÜNTER, some of her art quotes by the German woman artist, female painter in Murnau and life partner of Kandinsky till 1914; Blaue Reiter

GABRIELE MÜNTER, the famous German woman painter (Blaue Reiter) with some of her quotes on painting art, the artists of Blaue Reiter and her life. Gabrièle Münter painted and lived together with Kandinsky during their famous ‘Murnau’ period till 1914. Despite all kind of abstracting elements she took over from Kandinsky, Münter kept her representative attitude, creating landscape paintings in strong and colored forms, till the end of her life.

( click for all the collected quotes by the German woman artist, Gabrièle Münter )

a selection of her quotes:
- I was never interested in being just modern – I mean in creating a new style. I simply painted in whatever style seemed to suit me best. But Kandinsky was a thinker and had to express his ideas in words, so he constantly formulated new theories of art which he liked to discuss with Kubin, who was also a thinker…
* source of famous German female artists quotes: interview 1958; as quoted in ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists at Mid-century’ Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, London, 1990, p. 118 (quote on painting, great German woman painter Gabriele Münter, Blaue Reiter)


- …Kandinsky was an optimist; he had been interested, at first, in fairy tales and legends and chivalrous themes of the past, but he then became increasingly interested, after 1908, in formulating what he called the art of the future rather than indulging in romantic visions of the past. Kubin, on the other hand was a pessimist, always haunted by the past and suspicious of the future. This basic difference in their temperaments made their discussions all t the more fruitful, and their friendship was the more intense. (1958)
* source of famous German female artists quotes: interview 1958; as quoted in ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists at Mid-century’ Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, London, 1990, p. 118 (quote on painting, great German woman painter Gabriele Münter, Blaue Reiter)


- I don’t think that Kandinsky was ever really a communist. He just happened to be in Russia and to become involved in some revolutionary artistic activities because of his reputation as a revolutionary in the arts. In any case, he left Russia as soon as an opportunity arose. But we had parted, by that time, and I prefer not to express any opinion on Kandinsky’s later ideas and beliefs, with which I was never familiar. (1958)
* source of famous German female artists quotes: interview 1958; as quoted in ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists at Mid-century’ Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, London, 1990, pp. 118-119 (quote on painting, great German woman painter Gabriele Münter, Blaue Reiter)


- Yes, we (Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriéle Münter, fh) shared very much the same tastes and ideas, when we lived together in this house (the ‘Russian house’ in Murnau, fh). She was extremely perceptive and intelligent, but Alexej von Jawlensky (married with Marianne, fh) didn’t always approve of her work… …Suddenly Jawlensky would pick on some tiny detail of one of Marianne’s best and most original pictures and exclaim: ‘That patch of color, there, is laid on much too flat and smoothly. It’s just like old Riepin (famous Russian painter Ilya Repin, and a teacher once, when both had studied together, fh). Of course it was nonsense and he was only saying it to annoy her. But Jawlensky really was a devotee of the touche de peinture of the French Fauvists, rather than an innovator, a believer in a new kind of art of the future. (1958)
* source of famous German female artists quotes: interview 1958; as quoted in ‘Dialogues – conversations with European Artists at Mid-century’ Edouard Roditi, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, London, 1990, pp. 118-119 (quote on painting, great German woman painter Gabriele Münter, Blaue Reiter)


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GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, some of her art quotes by the famous American woman artist; great female painter of American landscape

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, the famous American woman artist with some of her quotes on creating painting art and her life as female painter, travelling through America country with a Ford, painting her wide landscapes. Her art quotes demonstrate a very personal way of painting and her intimate relation with American landscape in her art and life. Georgia was married with the famous photographer and art dealer Stieglitz; she created her paintings in the heart of American Modernism, but in a very individual way. In her art O’Keeffe synthesizes abstraction and a representation of her chosen motifs: rocks, flowers, shells, animal bones, skulls, etc.

( click for all the collected quotes by the American woman artist, Georgia O’Keeffe )

a selection of her quotes:
- My spring has been much better than every travelling springs of the last two years – I have been working – or trying to work my garden into a kind of permanent shape… … At the moment I have three rose bushes so full of red and yellow roses that they look on fire – they are really astonishing – You would really laugh to see them – two are very tall – the other smaller – It is a rose that is the reddest red on top and yellow underneath – then sometimes a few spots that are deep butter yellow – and an odd iris – dirty lavender petals reaching up – a pale lavender mixed with yellow that greys it and yellow petals mixed with a little lavender drooping down – very handsome – There are lots of ordinary colors too – many kinds. Well – that’s my life -…
* source of famous American female artists quotes: a letter to Anita Pollitzer, Abiquiu, New Mexico, May 31, 1955; as quoted in ”The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer”, ed. Clive Giboire, Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc. New York 1990, p. 298 ( great American woman painter Georgia O’Keeffe, quote on painting and life)


- Dear Anita, don’t forget Mary Cassatt (famous American impressionist woman painter, fh) – and I am not sure that your new paragraph will hold water (Anita sent her a chapter of the biography she was writing of Georgia O’Keeffe, fh) – We probably all derive from something – with some it is more obvious than with others – so much so that we can not escape a language of line that has been growing in meaning since the beginning of lines.
* source of famous American female artists quotes:: a letter to Anita Pollitzer, Abiquiu, New Mexico, January 17, 1956; as quoted in ”The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer”, ed. Clive Giboire, Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc. New York 1990, p. 305 ( great American woman painter Georgia O’Keeffe, quote on painting and life)


- Dear Anita, I read your manuscript some time ago and it has lain on my table - … …You have written your dream picture of me – and I am not that way at all. We are such different kinds of people that it reads as if we spoke different languages and didn’t understand one another at all. You write of the legends others have made up about me – but when I read your manuscript, it seems as much a myth as all the others. I really believe that to call this my biography when it has so little to do with me is impossible – and I cannot have my name exploited to further it…
* source, famous female American artist life quotes a letter to Anita Pollitzer, Abiquiu, New Mexico, February 28, 1968; as quoted in ”The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer”, ed. Clive Giboire, Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc. New York 1990, p. 320 ( great American woman painter Georgia O’Keeffe, quote on painting and life)


- …I do not like the idea of happiness – it is too momentary – I would say that I was always busy and interested in something – interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness…
* source of famous American female artists quotes:: a letter to Anita Pollitzer, Abiquiu, New Mexico, after 1968; as quoted in ”The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer”, ed. Clive Giboire, Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster Inc. New York 1990, p. 324 ( great American woman painter Georgia O’Keeffe, quote on painting and life)


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MARIANNE VON WEREFKIN, some of her quotes by the Russian famous woman artist with strong female inspiratory artistic power in Blue Rider / Blaue Reiter

MARIANNE VON WEREFKIN, the great Russian woman artist with some of her quotes on creating painting art as female painter, involved in Blaue Reiter / Blue Rider and strongly connected with the Russian painter Jawlensky for many years. Von Werefkin was famous for her expressive, colorful painting art she created in very simple forms. With other Blue Rider artists Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and her Russian ‘husband’, the painter Alexej von Jawlensky Marianne von Werefkin painted a lot in the open air around Munich and in Murnau. In 1914 she fled with Jawlensky to Switzerland; after 1918 they parted.

(for all the quotes by the German woman painter, Marianne von Werefkin )

a selection of her quotes:
- ..Oh my dear friend (Alexej von Jawlensky / The Unknown?, fh), you whose voice called me towards my beautiful past, oh how I love you because you are young, you serve the idea, you understand the beauty of a life devoted completely to abstraction. Oh the devil you have done me, and the good of this devil. There is an atrocious page in my existence… …I am not a woman. Neither love nor the family satisfies me. I don’t like the baby. I detest the household. I love all works of the human genius, I adore art the beauties of nature and of the heart. The beautiful, the beautiful in all such as love and such as life.
* source of famous German female artists quotes: ‘Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905’, Vol 1 ‘My beautiful One, My Unique!’, Marianne von Werefkin, Museo Communale, Ascona; as quoted in “Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists”, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 132 (quote by Marinanne von Werefkin famous Russian / German woman painter in Blaue Reiter, creating colorful paintings)


- The artist is the only one who detaches himself from life, opposes his personality against it, he is the only one who orders things as he wishes them to be in place of things as they are. Thus for him life is not a fait accompli, it is something to remake, to do again. He takes possession of his gifts in order to continue, to change, He makes his choice, it is he who creates the conceptions of beautiful and ugly, those are the things to preserve, the things to change. At the seat of the things that it is necessary to change he puts his desires, his aspirations, in one word, his personality…
* source of famous American female artists quotes: ‘Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905’, Vol 1 ‘My beautiful One, My Unique!’, Marianne von Werefkin, Museo Communale, Ascona; as quoted in “Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists”, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 132 (quote by Marinanne von Werefkin famous Russian / German woman painter in Blaue Reiter, creating colorful paintings)


- Art is not hysteria. Art is as natural to man as is thought, it is a normal function of his brain. Art is observation and consciousness. It is not an instinct, vague, indecisive, sickly. Art is an eternal source – life, and an unlimited expression, the individual. These two elements, well-adapted, make masterpieces.. ..All speech that a human being finds to give a new impression is of art. Why believe that the speech must be epileptic to become art?.. …Such is art. It is the product of life and the individual. It is born from their clash, from the received impression. But this impression is made once, for then it is no longer, neither life nor the individual…
* source of famous American female artists quotes: ‘Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905’, Vol 1 ‘My beautiful One, My Unique!’, Marianne von Werefkin, Museo Communale, Ascona; as quoted in “Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists”, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 132 (quote by Marinanne von Werefkin famous Russian / German woman painter in Blaue Reiter, creating colorful paintings)