Robert Motherwell (1915 - 1991)

No image available

From Painters' Objects January 1944 *

"Is there, then, some difference between what we have always called abstract art, and that extreme form of it, name nonobjective art, which is a difference in kind, and not, as we have supposed, merely in degree? For painting plainly has always been a species of abstraction: the painter has selected from the world he knows, a world which is not entirely the same in each epoch, the forms and relations which interested him, and then employed them as he pleased."

From The Modern Painter's World, 10 August 1944 *

"The function of the artist is to express reality as felt. ... It is because reality has a historical character that we feel the need for new art. The past has bequeathed us great works of art; if they were wholly satisfying, we should not need new ones. From this past art, we accept what persists qua eternally valuable, as when we reject the specific religious values of Egyptian or Christian art, and accept with gratitude their form."

"It is an aesthetician's error to suppose that the artist's principal concern is truth. Both are technical problems, which the artist and the philosopher must solve, but they do not represent the end in view. To express the felt nature of reality is the artist's principal concern."

"In the greatest painting, the painter communes with himself. Painting is his thought's medium. Others are able to participate in this communion to the degree that they are spiritual. But for the painter to communicate with all, in their own terms, is for him to take on their character, not his own."

From a statement in Fourteen Americans, a MOMA exhibition in 1946 *

"In the art schools they say that one ought to learn anatomy, and then 'forget' it, in the sense no doubt that for Mozart the sonata form became as much a part of the functioning of his body-mind as his personal talent. Medical anatomy is irrelevant to the ends of modern art; but there are some things that must be known as well as anatomy has been in the past, so that in the process of working in terms of feeling they need not be consciously thought. One is to know that art is not national, that to be merely an American or a French artist is to be nothing; to fail to overcome one's initial environment is never to reach the human. Still, we cannot become international by willing it, or by following a foreign pattern. This state of mind arises instead from following the nature of true reality, by taking things for what they are, whether native or foreign. It is part of what Plato meant by techne, that is, mobilizing one's means in relation to an insight into the structure of reality. With such insight, nationalities become accidental appearances; and no rendering of the appearance of reality can move us like a revelation of its structure. Thus when we say that one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is not meant in the sense of a slogan, of a super-chauvinism, but as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level."