Quote

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

Robert Motherwell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

Image
The main thing is not to be dead.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Robert Motherwell
Image
For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
Robert Motherwell
Image
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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.
Robert Motherwell
Image
The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
Robert Motherwell
Image
A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
Image
I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skilfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell
Image
For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
Robert Motherwell