55+ Robert Motherwell Quotes On Art, Artwork And Paper

Robert Motherwell was an American artist who was a leading figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He is best known for his large-scale paintings, collages, and prints that explored themes of mortality, memory, and the human condition. His works often incorporated elements of surrealism and cubism, and his later works were heavily influenced by his interest in philosophy and literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Motherwell on art, life, love.

Top 10 Robert Motherwell Quotes

1. Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
2. Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
3. It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.
4. One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.
5. It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
6. I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.
7. The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?
8. Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
9. The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.
10. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.

Robert Motherwell Short Quotes

• Each brushstroke is a decision.
• A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
• I feel most real to myself in the studio.
• For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
• Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
• Art is an experience, not an object.
• To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
• Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation
• In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
• Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.

Robert Motherwell Quotes About Art

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

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with. — Robert Motherwell

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. — Robert Motherwell

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality. — Robert Motherwell

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception. — Robert Motherwell

One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare. — Robert Motherwell

It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic. — Robert Motherwell

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world. — Robert Motherwell

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. — Robert Motherwell

A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem. — Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell Quotes About Abstract

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures. — Robert Motherwell

I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning. — Robert Motherwell

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all. — Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell Quotes About People

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are. — Robert Motherwell

By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing - or word processing, as it's known to the same people who call journalism 'content. — Robert Motherwell

The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain. — Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell Famous Quotes And Sayings

What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between. — Robert Motherwell

If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees. — Robert Motherwell

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them. — Robert Motherwell

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss. — Robert Motherwell

I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skilfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering. — Robert Motherwell

Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it. — Robert Motherwell

To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I. — Robert Motherwell

In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential. — Robert Motherwell

It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size. — Robert Motherwell

The main thing is not to be dead. — Robert Motherwell

In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted. — Robert Motherwell

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out. — Robert Motherwell

Every picture one paints involves not painting others. — Robert Motherwell

The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations. — Robert Motherwell

If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks-but never three. — Robert Motherwell

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content. — Robert Motherwell

In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work. — Robert Motherwell

I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer. — Robert Motherwell

It is true that every artist has his own religion. — Robert Motherwell

Life Lessons by Robert Motherwell

1. Robert Motherwell believed in the power of art to express emotion and to create a dialogue between the artist and the viewer. He taught us to be open to new ideas and to embrace our own individual creativity.
2. He encouraged us to take risks and to explore our own unique style, no matter how unconventional or unfamiliar it may seem.
3. He also taught us to be resilient and to keep creating even in the face of criticism or failure, as this is the only way to truly grow and develop as an artist.