Robert Motherwell
43 quotes
Biography
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
"It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception."
"Wherever art appears, life disappears."
"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."
"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."
"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."
"Plastic automatism.. ..as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] 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."
"Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science.. .In this world modern artists form a kind of spiritual underground."
"[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or metaphysical or ethical or social, that, being garbed in the costumes of the past, get in the way of their enjoyment."
"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. [quote in 1946]"
"One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again."
"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."
"It is Cezanne'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.."
"Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head."
"Don't underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters [like his artist-friends William Baziotes and w:Roberto Matta in those days."
"..there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade."
"Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] 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 w:Henri Focillon on Japanese legends of 'accidentalism']"
"[the 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..."
"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."
"The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd."
"..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."
"..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ]."
"It would be very difficult to formulate a position in which there were no external relations. I cannot imagine any structure being defined as though it only has internal meaning."
"..for most painters nowadays [1954] 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."
"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."
"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."