Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwellwas an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth24 January 1915
CountryUnited States of America
Robert Motherwell quotes about
writing people tasks
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.
art struggle simple
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.
art encounters forgotten
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.
mean drawing secret
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.
artist drawing vision
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.
brushes oneself
In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
real feels studios
I feel most real to myself in the studio.
beautiful canvas empty
To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
wine mean simple
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.
children flower giving
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.
opposites trying painting
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.
art order mind
The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.
wine labels letters
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.
feelings needs language
The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?