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WD_334/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0334 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Robert Motherwell (1915 - 1991) -
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."
-www.constable.net/arthistory/glo-motherwell.html
Franz Kline, (1910 - 1962) -
From "Franz Kline Talking," Evergreen Review, Autumn 1958:
"you don't paint the way someone, by observing your life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to in order to give, that's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving." *Johnson
From "An Interview with David Sylvester," Living Arts I, 1963:
"Paint never seems to behave the same. Even the same paint doesn't, you know. In other words, if you use the same white or black or red, through the use of it, it never seems to be the same. It doesn't dry the same. It doesn't stay there and look at you the same way. Other things seem to affect it. There seems to be something that you can do so much with paint and after that you start murdering it. There are moments or periods when it would be wonderful to plan something and do it and have the thing only do what you planned to do, and then, there are other times when the destruction of those planned things becomes interesting to you. So then, it becomes a question of destroying -- of destroying the planned form; it's like an escape, it's something to do; something to begin the situation. You yourself, you don't decide, but it you want to paint you have to find out some way to start this thing off, whether it's painting it out or putting it on, and so on..." *Johnson
*Johnson - Johnson, Ellen H., ed., American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, Harper & Row, 1982.
-www.constable.net/arthistory/glo-misc20c.html#kline
Barnett Newman (1905 - 1970) -
Excerpted from "The Ideographic Picture," Betty Parsons Gallery, NY, Jan 20 - Feb 8, 1947 (source: *Johnson):
"The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene, nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of non-objective pattern to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal 'abstraction' of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudo-scientific truths.
The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist's problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor Fauvist deconstruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery -- of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else."
From Newman's reply to Clement Greenberg's review in The Nation, December 6, 1947, quoted in Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, New York, 1969 (the original reply was not published in The Nation) (source: *Johnson):
"The world the European artists have created has always been tied to sensation in spite of the fact that in recent years their constant struggle has been to free themselves from the natural world. Brilliant as their successes have been they have always had their base in the material world of sensuality. They may have transcended it but they have never been able to do without it. Can anyone name a single European painter who is able to dispense completely with nature? The lists of the Cubists, Fauvists and Surrealists with nature are obvious. The Purists tried to deny nature and became involved with its diagrammatic equivalents -- with the realism of geometric shapes. A ninety-degree angle, a triangle and a circle are as much a part of nature as a tree and have its elements of recognizability. In truth the Purists, from Mondrian to Kandinsky, never denied nature but asserted they were depicting the truest nature, the nature of mathematical law.
The American artists under discussion [ed. note: Newman, Gottlieb, Rothko, Still, and 'others'] create a truly abstract world which can be discussed only in metaphysical terms. These artists are at home in the world of pure idea, in the meanings of abstract concepts, just as the European painter is at home in the world of cognitive objects and materials. And just as the European painter can transcend his objects to build a spiritual world, so the American transcends his abstract world to make that world real, rendering the epistemological implications of abstract concepts with sufficient conviction and understanding to give them body and expression.
...
The American painters under discussion create an entirely different reality to arrive at new unsuspected images. They start with the chaos of pure fantasy and feeling, with nothing that has any known physical, visual or mathematical counterpart and they bring out of this chaos of emotion images which give these intangibles reality. There is no struggle to go to the fantastic through the real, or to the abstract through the real. Instead the struggle is to bring out from the non-real, from the chaos of ecstasy, something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experienced moment of total reality. This of course may be a metaphysical notion but it is no more metaphysical than the idea that the realization by Cézanne of his complete and pure sensation of his apples adds up to more than the apples, or that the two-faced heads by Picasso are more than the two heads, or that the strict geometry of Mondrian is more than the sum of its angles. That to me is an equal kind of mysticism.
...
The Americans evoke their world of emotion and fantasy by a kind of personal writing without the props of any known shape. This is a metaphysical act. With the European abstract painters we are into their spiritual world though already known images. This is a transcendental act. To put it philosophically, the European is concerned with the transcendence of objects while the American is concerned with the reality of the transcendental experience.
*Johnson - Johnson, Ellen H., ed., American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, Harper & Row, 1982.
-www.constable.net/arthistory/glo-newman.html
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