

Robert Motherwell
National Gallery of Art
Washington DC
Beside the Sea # 42, 1966
black ink on wove paper
77.79 x 56.51 cm
Various Artist quotes.
Robert Motherwell (American 1915-1991):
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks-but never three.
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.
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.
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
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.
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Quotes.
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877 French):
Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
Fine art is knowledge made visible.
France is the only nation in which astoundingly small numbers of civilized patrons reside.
I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.
I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
When we see men of worth, we should think of equalling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inward and examine ourselves.
Gustave Courbet
Woman with Parrot, 1866
Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 195.6 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY
(February 27 - May 17, 2008 - at the Metropolitan, a Courbet Retrospective. Exhibition overview.)

