22 quotes
Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head.
One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again.
Beyond the Aesthetics (1946)
Among other ends, modern art is related to the ideal of Internationalism.
..there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade.
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.
The painter and the audience (1954)
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.
..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ].
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
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.
..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.
When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me.
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.
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..
Beyond the Aesthetics (1946)
I love painting the way one loves the body of a women.. ..if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need.
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 aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist's task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.
Beyond the Aesthetics (1946)
..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.
The painter and the audience (1954)
Compared with Brancusi, Matisse, Miro, I'm a barbarian. If people would understand the barbaric force of my paintings, instead of always pointing out how well I understand Picasso. I'm a Viking who has read French literature.
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.
All my life I've been working on the work - every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so as an approximation keeps you going.