26 quotes
I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity.
If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.
If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about.
Comment after Reinhardt's death (1967)
Time is what you have left.. ..you just march with it and use it the best you can.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.
The aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
Only what can be seen there [in the painting] is there.. .What you see is what you see.
I know what I want, but it's physically beyond me now. I can work on what I can handle. It's a playoff between the object and my physical limits.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!
There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.
The Pratt lecture (1960)
I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.
I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas.. .I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.
Questions to Stella and Judd (1966)
People say that the paintings are always big because they're striving for effect, but they're also big so that I don't trip over myself, so that I have room to work, and people can come in and be comfortable.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
When people still talk about art that I made in the 60's— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
I hate to say this. ..it's made to order. Then, I disorder it a little bit or, I should say, I reorder it. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to claim that I had the ability to disorder it. I wish I did.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
I wanted something that was direct – right to you eye .. ..something you didn't have to look around – you got the whole thing right away.
[Asked: "Is that one of the reasons you went into sculpture?"] I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.
Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities (2000)
Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.
Questions to Stella and Judd (1966)