21 quotes
Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power.
While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension — working strength — is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
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)
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)
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)
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)