Robert Motherwell in his artist quotes on painting & American life - free resource, art history

Robert Motherwell quotes - the American artist on his painting art & life in American Abstract Expressionism - free art-resource for students, pupils and art teachers

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Robert Motherwell’s quotes reveal an intense and concentrated relation between the artist himself and American painting art of the 1940’s and 50’s. The aesthetic element is for him the most essential element in modern painting.
If an art-work is not aesthetic, there is no art at all for Motherwell! The essential content of art is ‘feeling’. So the task for the artist is to create an object for sensing, for experiencing.

In his own painting art Motherwell moved during his whole life between Surrealism and Abstract. He was connected with both art-scenes in New York. He had a clear point of view and rejected pure abstract art. ‘No art without external relations’, so he explained his famous series ‘Spanish Elegies’ (see one at the right); they were meant as a lamentation.
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Some selected quotes of Robert Motherwell - as a short introduction of his extended quotes in the PDF:

• ’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…’ - Motherwell’s quote, from his text: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, in ‘Design 47’, no 8, April 1946

• ’Don’t underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters’ - as quoted in ‘Abstract Painting’, Thomas Hess, New York, Viking 1951, p. 132

• ’I believe that painter’s judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way… …an artist’s ‘art’ is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en routes.’ - quote of Motherwell, in his text ‘The painter and the audience’, 1954
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  links for selected free art-resources on Robert Motherwell:

  • biographical notes on Robert Motherwell, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Motherwell
  • artist-quotes of ànd about Motherwell’, Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Motherwell
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    editor: Fons Heijnsbroek / Matrozenhof (FotoDutch on Wikiquote):<br>[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/User:FotoDutch]