Top 40 Robert Motherwell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Art is an experience, not an object.”

— Robert Motherwell

2. “Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life – rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.”

— Robert Motherwell

3. “It is true that every artist has his own religion.”

— Robert Motherwell

4. “Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”

— Robert Motherwell

5. “Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.”

— Robert Motherwell

6. “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

7. “What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you’ve made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.”

— Robert Motherwell

8. “To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.”

— Robert Motherwell

9. “Wherever art appears, life disappears.”

— Robert Motherwell

10. “In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted.”

— Robert Motherwell

11. “It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual’s and society’s self-deception.”

— Robert Motherwell

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Robert Motherwell

14. “If you can’t find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.”

— Robert Motherwell

15. “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

16. “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

17. “In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.”

— Robert Motherwell

18. “One of the most striking of abstract art’s appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.”

— Robert Motherwell

19. “Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.”

— Robert Motherwell

20. “Each brushstroke is a decision.”

— Robert Motherwell

21. “Collage is the twentieth century’s greatest innovation.”

— Robert Motherwell

22. “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

23. “It’s possible to paint a monumental picture that’s only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size.”

— Robert Motherwell

24. “Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.”

— Robert Motherwell

25. “The public’s appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.”

— Robert Motherwell

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.”

— Robert Motherwell

29. “An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true – to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth – the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.”

— Robert Motherwell

30. “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

31. “One’s art is just one’s effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.”

— Robert Motherwell

32. “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

33. “The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.”

— Robert Motherwell

34. “The main thing is not to be dead.”

— Robert Motherwell

35. “A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.”

— Robert Motherwell

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Robert Motherwell

38. “I feel most real to myself in the studio.”

— Robert Motherwell

39. “For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.”

— Robert Motherwell

40. “Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.”

— Robert Motherwell

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Robert Motherwell

45. “For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.”

— Robert Motherwell

46. “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.”

— Robert Motherwell

47. “For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.”

— Robert Motherwell

48. “I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.”

— Robert Motherwell

49. “Every picture one paints involves not painting others.”

— Robert Motherwell