[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or met… - Robert Motherwell

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[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or metaphysical or ethical or social, that, being garbed in the costumes of the past, get in the way of their enjoyment.

English
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About Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an U.S. abstract expressionist painter. He was one of the youngest artists of the 'New York School' (a phrase he coined), which also included a.o. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Phillip Guston. Motherwell initiated many art debates and publications in this art-scene.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Robert Burns Motherwell Robert Burns Motherwell III
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Additional quotes by Robert Motherwell

The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist's task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.

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Before 1940 there was relatively little abstract art in America. Most of it was relatively geometric versions of Cubism, or of Mondrian and De Stijl, or of Arp reliefs, and the like. So that when our painting [of the artists of the New York School: Abstract Expressionism first appeared, the critics at once realized that to describe it as 'abstract' would be misleading.. .In America, the word (I suppose taken from Germany) for something highly emotional is 'expressionist', and some critic, either in the New Yorker or the New York Times then called it Abstract Expressionism, meaning that this was a very emotional art, but an abstract one.

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