Carolina QuotesI love painting the way one loves the body of a women.. ..if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need.
Robert Motherwell Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Conversation with W.C. Seitz, in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983
- work
- after 1970
- year
- 1970
Cite this record
“I love painting the way one loves the body of a women.. ..if…” Robert Motherwell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-54A159FF96. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/54a159ff96
More from Robert Motherwell
I mean, the official definition of Surrealism is to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions, which is exactly what we do [artist in New York School / Abstract Expressionism]. At the same time Surrealism was an assault, - with a few exceptions: Giacometti, Arp and Miro - on the 'purity' of painting. I mean mean, on making painting - means themselves speak, without reliance on literature; and that second insistence of Surrealism, Americans really rejected. So that historically.. ..Abstract Expressionism is in part, I think, a fusion of certain Surrealist means, above all plastic 'automatism' with the Cubist's insistence that the picture speaks as a picture in strictly pictorial language.
The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society's logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist's path.
When I was young I was more obsessed with the materiality of things.. ..today I am more interested in air and atmosphere. This is why I deliberately treat space ambivalently. For example, an orange painting with white lines might be viewed as an orange wall with white lines, but the orange colour is no less atmospheric for all of that. It abounds white light, and the white line vibrate in a deep space, too, as well as an orange 'wall'.