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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.

— Robert Motherwell

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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.