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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

Robert Motherwell

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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Deception
Necessity
Deep
Society
Individual
Art
May
Self
Examination

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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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.
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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell
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Each brushstroke is a decision.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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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
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If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
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Art is an experience, not an object.
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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.
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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
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To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
Robert Motherwell
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Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
Robert Motherwell
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In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
Robert Motherwell
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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
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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
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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
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The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?
Robert Motherwell