List of Robert Motherwell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any Incentive To Paint Is As Good As Any Other. There Is No Poor Subject.

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.

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.

In The Brush Doing What It Is Doing, It Will Stumble On What One Could Not Do By Oneself.

The Public's Appetite For Famous People Is A Mouth As Big As A Mountain.

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.

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.

To End Up With A Canvas That Is No Less Beautiful Than The Empty Canvas Is To Begin With.