Great Throughts Treasury

"Like Rimbaud before them, the Surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa (as Rimbaud did, fh). They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true ?poetry? was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane ? if not the creatures themselves."

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

"No true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began? it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one?s own style."

"Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence to a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need."

"One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again."

"One is to know that art is not national, that to be merely an American or a French artist is to be nothing; to fail to overcome one?s initial environment is never to reach the human? Thus when we say one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is? as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level."

"One must agree with Rilke when he says that with ?nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words?? It was Marcel Duchamp who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the ?Mona Lisa?. And so was Mondrian when he dreamt of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture in to a transcendent ensemble."

"One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare."

"One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union."

"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."

"Process of painting? is conceived of as an adventure, without preconceived ideas on the part of persons of intelligence, sensibility, and passion. Fidelity to what occurs between oneself and the canvas, no matter how unexpected, becomes central? the major decisions in the process of painting are on the grounds of truth, not taste."

"Sketchbooks in general... seem to contain mainly studies for paintings... 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."

"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."

"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 should have no feeling toward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element."

"The game is organizing states of feeling."

"The most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality. Like Cubism before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is?."

"Plastic automatism? as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Mir¢, and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions."

"The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society?s logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist?s path."

"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."

"The main thing is not to be dead."

"The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent ?objects? (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right ? veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended."

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

"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..."

"The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?"

"We must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the ?body-and-mind? as a whole to the events of reality."

"When I was young I was more obsessed with the materiality of things? ?today I am more interested in air and atmosphere. This is why I deliberately treat space ambivalently. For example, an orange painting with white lines might be viewed as an orange wall with white lines, but the orange colour is no less atmospheric for all of that. It abounds white light, and the white line vibrate in a deep space, too, as well as an orange ?wall?."

"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."

"Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail."

"Wherever art appears, life disappears."

"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."

"You don't have to paint a figure to express human feelings. The game is not what things look like."