Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchabl… - Robert Motherwell

I hung Baziote's [painting] show with him at Peggy's in 1944. After it was up and we had stood in silence looking at it for a while, I noticed he had turned white.. .Suddenly he [Baziotes] looked at me and said: 'You're the one I trust; if you tell me the show is no good, I'll take it right down and cancel it.'.. ..you see, at the opposite side of the coin of the abstract expressionist's ambition and of out not giving a damn, was also not knowing whether our pictures were even pictures, let alone whether they were any good...

A 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.

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.