..there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade. - 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.

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.. .Thus when we say one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is.. ..as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level. [quote in 1946]

I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting.. .An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies...