45 quotes
I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.
The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962)
It is the greatest injustice done to Mondrian that people who are plastically blind see only decorative design instead of the plastic perfection which characterizes his work. The whole De Stijl group from which Mondrian's art was derived must be considered a protest against such blindness.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Dreams and reality are united in our imagination. The artist possesses the means to create only after he has effective command of his faculty of empathy which he must develop simultaneously with his imaginative capacity.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is the expression of his overflowing soul. Because his soul is rich, he cares comparatively little about the superficial necessities of the material world; he sublimates the pressure of material affairs in an artistic experience.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
At the time of making a picture, I want not to know what I am doing.; a picture should me made with feeling, not with knowing.
The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature — translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The knowledge of reality, achieved by means of the complete sensory equipment, must be expressed artistically in terms of a medium which appeals to the memory of all sensory experience — but only through the eye.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The encompassing, creative mind recognizes no boundaries. The mind has ever brought new spheres under its control.
All our experiences culminate in the perception of the universe as a whole, with man as its center.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
I am many people.
Technique is always the consequence of the dominating concept.. ..with the change of concept, technique will change.
The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.
Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (1983)
The physical carrier is overshadowed by a relation. The relation creates an overtone. The physical carrier is absorbed by this overtone. The overtone spontaneously transforms the means of creation into a spiritual reality. The mystery of creation is then revealed.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The impressionistic method leads into a complete splitting and dissolution of all areas involved in the composition, and color is used to create an overall effect of light. The color is, through such a shading down from the highest light in the deepest shadows, sacrified an degraded to a (black-and-white) function. This leads to the destructions of the color as color.
Then [speaking of his loosely figurative work of the 1930's, in Germany] I was still under nature, not that I was imitating it; now [1957] I am above nature. But everything comes from nature, I too am part of nature; my memory comes from nature, too.
Space expands or contracts in the tensions and functions through which it exists. Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Basically I hate categorical labels. As a young artist I already was very clear about this — that 'objectification' is not the final aim of art. For there are greater things than the object. The greatest thing is the human mind.
The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962)