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Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

— Robert Motherwell

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Art

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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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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.