Carolina QuotesA modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters.
Robert Motherwell Connected to the Carolinas
Source
p. 107
- work
- 'The painter and the audience' (1954)
- year
- 1954
- locator
- p. 107
Cite this record
“A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he …” Robert Motherwell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-EE17209A51. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ee17209a51
More from Robert Motherwell
Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure.. .No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development.
Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world.. .The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.
Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science.. .In this world modern artists form a kind of spiritual underground.