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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.

— Robert Motherwell Beyond the Aesthetics (1946)

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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)

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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.