Great Throughts Treasury

"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."

"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."

"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."

"A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium."

"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."

"Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty."

"A plastic weapon with which to invent new forms? (remark on the concept of ?automatic painting / writing? invented in Surrealism, fh)"

"Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject."

"Art is an experience, not an object."

"Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation."

"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.'"

"Don?t underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters."

"Each brushstroke is a decision."

"Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh?s drama and Seurat?s silent harmony were born in the same country and epoch: but they do not contradict one another; they refer to different patterns among those which constitute reality."

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

"Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head."

"Every picture one paints involves not painting others."

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

"Generally, I use few colors? Mainly I use each color as simply symbolic? I guess that black and white, which I use most often, tend to be protagonists."

"For most painters nowadays examination is self-examination ? this is all that we are accustomed to ? while the relation to the audience is a social matter. And it is our pictures, not ourselves, that live the social life and meet the public."

"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."

"I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skillfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering."

"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."

"I love painting the way one loves the body of a women? ?if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need."

"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."

"Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses to the objects of the external world? The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life."

"I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view."

"I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world."

"I believe that painter?s judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting? ?An artist?s ?art? is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh?s like trophies."

"I begin (a painting) from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience,, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it?s not altogether arbitrary what one begins with? certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that ?I am going to paint something I know? by ?through the act of painting I?m going to find out exactly how I feel?."

"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..."

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

"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."

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

"In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands ?too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas ?dirt?, so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak ?work in reverse?, and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on."

"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."

"In the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't do by oneself."

"I think he (Pollock) responded to rhythm more than anything else in art. Indeed, perhaps it is not too much to assert that his greatest works are marked by the intensity and violence of his rhythm, modified by an incorruptible respect for the work?s flat surface, an art masculine and lyrical and, as in a Celtic dance, measured, despite its original primitive impulse. That he also meant to me, his rhythm"

"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 watercolor or drawing or whatever... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work."

"It is true that every artist has his own religion."

"It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception."

"It would be very difficult to formulate a position in which there were no external relations. I cannot imagine any structure being defined as though it only has internal meaning."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government?s financial structure? ?No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development."

"It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being..."

"It is Paul C‚zanne?s feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling."

"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."