Top 100 Art Abstract Quotes
#1. 'Abstract' literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract ... a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.
Richard Diebenkorn
#2. Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Walter Pater
#3. I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.
Vladimir Nabokov
#4. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.
Richard Diebenkorn
#5. On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.
Freya Stark
#6. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.
Agnes Martin
#7. I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy.
Steven Wright
#8. Your art is so abstract that I can only see it through my mind's eye and touch it through my heart.
Debasish Mridha
#9. 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
#10. Abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.
Piet Mondrian
#11. I want to see abstract art move. Especially in the '30s, you had animators doing innovative work, and I was entranced by that. It's basically what you see when you close your eyes, when you fall asleep.
Michel Gondry
#12. Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes ... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.
Arshile Gorky
#13. Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.
Agnes Martin
#14. Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.
Ben Nicholson
#15. All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.
David Hockney
#16. To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.
Ben Shahn
#17. Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.
Donald Judd
#18. There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts tot the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
Jean Dubuffet
#19. Art - when it is really doing what it should do - teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see.
Bill T. Jones
#20. Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive ...
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.
Roger Ballen
#21. Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.
Alex Grey
#22. It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism
Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete
opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.
Igor Stravinsky
#23. In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered.
Melissa Brown
#24. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#26. Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium.
Piet Mondrian
#27. My advice to those who which to learn the art of scientific prophesy is not to rely on abstract reason, but to decipher the secret language of Nature from Nature's documents: the facts of experience.
Max Born
#28. There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Pablo Picasso
#29. The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key
#30. As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists.
Arne Glimcher
#31. I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.
Jonas Mekas
#32. Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
Robert Musil
#33. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.
Clement Greenberg
#34. You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.
Robert Rauschenberg
#35. We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition ...
Asger Jorn
#37. In the abstract art of cooking,
ingredients trump appliances,
passion supersedes expertise,
creativity triumphs over technique,
spontaneity inspires invention,
and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious.
Bob Blumer
#38. I personally don't care for abstract art. I have always felt, 'To each his own.' There's art out there for everybody.
Howard Terpning
#39. Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.
Etel Adnan
#40. Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?
Storm Jameson
#41. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.
Henry Moore
#42. We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.
Andy Warhol
#43. Philosophy is the abstract art of thoughts and perceptions that form colors of words and languages that paint the canvas of our minds.
Debasish Mridha
#44. Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.
Wassily Kandinsky
#45. We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
Salvador Dali
#46. It is so wearisome having to represent things. That is why I refuse to look at abstract art. It is much too suggestive of the style of my thoughts, and I never think about my thoughts.
Bauvard
#47. I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
Claes Oldenburg
#48. Getting dressed for a woman is an art form, surreal, vaguely abstract, figurative and byzantine. When you undress a woman you enter her subconscious kingdom, her scents, her secrets and her fantasy.
Chloe Thurlow
#49. Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.
Irving Stone
#50. At Columbia there's no performing arts department, so I was searching for it everywhere I could, and I took some photography classes and I ended up becoming fascinated with Eastern Religion, and ultimately it seemed to encompass the more abstract mind that I have.
Jake Gyllenhaal
#51. Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
#52. When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.
Caio Fonseca
#54. The movement of abstract art ... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.
Meyer Schapiro
#55. The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.
Paul Klee
#56. No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
#57. I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it's all we need.
Ai Weiwei
#58. All good art is abstract in its structure.
Paul Strand
#59. Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.
Wassily Kandinsky
#60. [My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.
Nicolas Provost
#61. I blink rapidly, breaking our reverie and force myself to focus on something,anything, other than his beauty. Or his body. A body I want pressed against mine, limbs and tongues twisted and tangled, our flesh contortioned into X-rated abstract art ...
S.L. Jennings
#62. The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.
Kenneth Tynan
#63. Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.
Robert Motherwell
#64. The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. This is critical to abstract art. Small differences make all the difference.
Kirk Varnedoe
#65. Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.
Robert Breault
#66. What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles ... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
Hans Hofmann
#67. If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years.
Mark Edward
#68. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.
Jonathan Culver
#69. Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.
Piet Mondrian
#70. At times we would have these whole cities that would take up rooms and stretch out all over the house. But they were also very abstract, like 'this piece of cardboard is a pool' and so forth.
Ellen Gallagher
#71. One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.
Robert Motherwell
#72. Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
#73. From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.
Pablo Picasso
#74. Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture.
Adrienne Monnier
#75. Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
Susan Sontag
#76. My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
#77. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements.
Jan Tschichold
#79. Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it.
Edgar Alwin Payne
#80. Abstract design is all right - for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.
Robert A. Heinlein
#81. Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.
Robert Motherwell
#82. These days people believe they can go into art and make a living. We didn't have that. The abstract expressionists were older, by the time they even got a show. Now people come right out of school and sell.
Brice Marden
#83. I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts.
Richard Schmid
#84. When I was growing up, nothing unpleasant was shown in the home. And when I was in art school, the only art that was presented to me was Abstract Expressionism. But I was interested in the grim stuff. It seemed more exciting.
Peter Saul
#85. Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.
Rudolf Arnheim
#86. I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.
Mark Rothko
#87. I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.
Vera Wang
#88. It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.
Jackson Pollock
#89. Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.
Meyer Schapiro
#90. All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.
Milford Zornes
#91. Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run.
Wendell Berry
#92. Some people who look at abstract art say 'I could do that.' A good response is, 'Go ahead but then you'll be accused of copying.
Christopher Willard
#93. I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"
Derek R. Audette
#94. What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.
Ed Askew
#95. The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences.
T.D. Jakes
#96. If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.
Gerhard Richter
#97. I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.
Jean Helion
#98. A work of art in paint should be beautiful and expressive as abstract colour and form and should not interest us necessarily in any 'story' outside of itself - or else it belongs to the field of illustration.
John F. Carlson
#99. A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot
William Boyd
#100. I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.
Roy Lichtenstein
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