Robert Motherwell Art Quotations

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

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

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

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being...

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.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

Art is an experience, not an object.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.