Quotes About Abstract Art

#1. Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture.

Adrienne Monnier

#2. One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

Robert Motherwell

#3. Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

Piet Mondrian

#4. 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

#5. Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.

Robert Breault

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

Wassily Kandinsky

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.

Jean Helion

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

Jackson Pollock

#16. 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

#17. Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

Robert Motherwell

#18. The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements.

Jan Tschichold

#19. 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

#20. In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered.

Melissa Brown

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.

Piet Mondrian

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

Ben Nicholson

#29. I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

Claes Oldenburg

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition ...

Asger Jorn

#37. 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

#38. There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

#39. 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

#40. Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Harold Rosenberg

#41. Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

#42. Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.

Anton Ehrenzweig

#43. I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.

Brittany Howard

#44. I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

Peggy Guggenheim

#45. The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

J.G. Ballard

#46. But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

Dominique De Menil

#47. Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Pablo Picasso

#48. Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

Debasish Mridha

#49. Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout.

Lawren Harris

#50. Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

Carl Andre

#51. Beauty is a type of art everyone is trying to perfect, but no one realizes it's abstract art.

Keaton Stromberg

#52. Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.

Meyer Schapiro

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

Robert Motherwell

#61. [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

#62. All good art is abstract in its structure.

Paul Strand

#63. I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it's all we need.

Ai Weiwei

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. All great art is abstract.

Jean Renoir

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

Gerhard Richter

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.

Milford Zornes

#75. My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

Mark Rothko

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. Art is only abstract when you look the other way.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

David Hockney

#92. '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

#93. 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

#94. Your art is so abstract that I can only see it through my mind's eye and touch it through my heart.

Debasish Mridha

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

Richard Diebenkorn

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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