Skip to content

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.

— Robert Motherwell

Another quote →

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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)

All Robert Motherwell quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Motherwell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.