Abstract Art quotes:

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Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. -- Al Capp
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. -- Pablo Picasso
I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless. -- Jonas Mekas
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. -- Salvador Dali
What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation. -- Hans Hofmann
I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy. -- Steven Wright
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. -- J. G. Ballard
In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered. -- Melissa Brown
Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form. -- Anton Ehrenzweig
abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. -- Piet Mondrian
Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes. -- Robert Breault
One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare. -- Robert Motherwell
Beauty is a type of art everyone is trying to perfect, but no one realizes it's abstract art. -- Keaton Stromberg
I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions. -- Claes Oldenburg
Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. -- Wassily Kandinsky
It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not. -- Jackson Pollock
I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art. -- Peggy Guggenheim
But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine. -- Dominique de Menil
Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it. -- Roy Lichtenstein
I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!" -- Derek R. Audette
I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts. -- Richard Schmid
In the abstract art of cooking, ingredients trump appliances, passion supersedes expertise, creativity triumphs over technique, spontaneity inspires invention, and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious. -- Bob Blumer
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. -- Kenneth Tynan
Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. -- Pablo Picasso
Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. -- Arshile Gorky
Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience. -- Robert Genn
Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative. -- Piet Mondrian
I personally don't care for abstract art. I have always felt, 'To each his own.' There's art out there for everybody. -- Howard Terpning
I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing. -- Brittany Howard
I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it. -- Roy Lichtenstein
All good art is abstract. -- John Newman
All good art is abstract in its structure. -- Paul Strand
My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes -- Mark Rothko
Art is only abstract when you look the other way. -- Karen Elizabeth Gordon
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. -- Ellen Key
All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth. -- Milford Zornes
Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture. -- Adrienne Monnier
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. -- Jan Tschichold
Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. -- Robert Motherwell
Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. -- Debasish Mridha
Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism! -- Carl Andre
We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition... -- Asger Jorn
Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality. -- Ben Nicholson
Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable. -- Robert Motherwell
Art has to be incredibly layered. Symbols, signifiers... layers that relate. Combine signifiers with more abstract notions. Push! Vary lines. -- Kay WalkingStick
I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes. -- Jean Helion
Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests. -- Meyer Schapiro
From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. -- Pablo Picasso
The movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture. -- Meyer Schapiro
Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout. -- Lawren Harris
The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences. -- T. D. Jakes
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. -- Ben Shahn
I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture. -- Christian Marclay
I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school. -- Vera Wang
Some people who look at abstract art say 'I could do that.' A good response is, 'Go ahead but then you'll be accused of copying. -- Christopher Willard
Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium. -- Piet Mondrian
The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. -- Paul Klee
People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form. -- Lucien Smith
It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic. -- Robert Motherwell
If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years. -- Mark Edward
Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all. -- Donald Judd
There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts tot the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art. -- Jean Dubuffet
Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression. -- Etel Adnan

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