Abstract Expressionism Quotes

Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! ~ LeRoy Neiman

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades ... It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop ... ~ Robert Indiana

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. ~ Jackson Pollock

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks. ~ Joni Mitchell

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. ~ Romare Bearden

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. ~ Mark Rothko

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own. ~ Jackson Pollock

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. ~ Aaron Huey

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. ~ Henry Flynt

Unfortunately, I do not find Tegmark's line of reasoning to be extremely compelling. The leap from the existence of an external reality (independent of humans) to the conclusion that, in Tegmark's words, "You must believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure," involves, in my opinion, a sleight of hand. When Tegmark attempts to characterize what mathematics really is, he says: "To a modern logician, a mathematical structure is precisely this: a set of abstract entities with relations between them." But this modern logician is human! In other words, Tegmark never really proves that our mathematics is not invented by humans; he simply assumes it. Furthermore, as the French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeaux has pointed out in response to a similar assertion: "To claim physical reality for mathematical objects, on a level of the natural phenomena we study in biology, poses a worrisome epistemological problem it seems to me. How can a physical state, internal to our brain, represent another physical state external to it? ~ Mario Livio

There are opposing forces in all living things. My work reflects this and stirs up a contrast of emotions in the viewer ... perception versus annoyance. To the viewer who has reached that level of awareness, my work is no longer abstract, but very real. ~ Eugene J. Martin

Since adolescence I've had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It's that German thread of the metaphysic - they were looking for the beyond in dreams. ~ Dumitru Tepeneag

The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete - right, Vic? ~ Neal Stephenson

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it. ~ Thomas Pynchon

we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world." A fabricated world? Yes, the world as a superstructure, the world as a spirit, weightless and abstract, of the same material with which thoughts are woven, and through which therefore they can move unhindered. A world that after three hundred years of natural science is left without mysteries. Everything is explained, everything is understood, everything lies within humanity's horizons of comprehension, from the biggest, the universe, whose oldest observable light, the farthest boundary of the cosmos, dates from its birth fifteen billion years ago, to the smallest, the protons and neutrons and mesons of the atom. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I respect the social graces enormously. How to pass the food. Don't yell from one room to another. Don't go through a closed door without a knock. Open the doors for the ladies. All these millions of simple household behaviors make for a better life. We can't live in constant rebellion against our parents - it's just silly. I'm very well mannered. It's not an abstract thing. It's a shared language of expectations. ~ Jack Nicholson

I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, item, one graceful attitude of body or mind, item, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say, 1821-1844
I have always believed this in love to be something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you
no, I do tell you
friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love. ~ A.S. Byatt

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

What it means to be a 'better person', then, must be concrete and practical - that is to say, concerned with people's political situations as a whole - rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of 'moral' argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications. ~ Terry Eagleton

Much of the colony's musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called "time span." What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp - or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting compositions. But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography - much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Knowledge does not abolish faith but gives it a more inward meaning. He who "knows" theoretically does indeed enjoy metaphysical certainty, but such certainty does not yet penetrate his whole being; it is as if, instead of believing a description, one saw the object described but without the sight of it implying either a detailed knowledge or a possession of the object, for a single visual perspective does not of course teach us the whole nature of the thing seen; thus there is certainty regarding the object as such in this case, but uncertainty regarding its integral nature. To "know" an object perfectly means to "possess" it, "become" it, "be" it; if the sight of an object is very much more than an abstract belief in its existence, the realization of the object will likewise be infinitely more than the sight of it; metaphysical certainty thus stands in a sense between belief--"faith" in the ordinary sense of the word--and the realization of union. As long as a man is not delivered from the chains of existence, there is always an element of "faith" in his "knowledge"; otherwise there would be nothing separating him from the Reality "known" or "to be known". ~ Frithjof Schuon

The seasons and the years came and went ... and always ... one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract. ~ W.G. Sebald

Life's contentment is like an abstract edifice with a domed ceiling of insanity ~ Munia Khan

I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion. ~ Costa-Gavras

A series of powers are at work within the great stream of Expressionism who have no outward similarity to one another but a common direction of thrust, namely the intention to give expression to things of the psyche [Seelisches] through form alone. ~ Max Ernst

When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things. ~ Cindy Sherman

The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable. ~ Robert K. Merton

I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to "a kind of teeming...like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance." That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry. ~ James Geary

I've always said that I expected to grow up and get married like any nice southern girl, but the fact is you don't get married in the abstract. You find someone that you'd like to be married to. ~ Condoleezza Rice

You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense. ~ Doron Zeilberger

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized. ~ David Hockney

We aren't really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts ~ James K.A. Smith

Linear's defeated form
The intangible reality rise.' ~ Wanderer ~ Stella Coulson

Her elegance was in the abstract; in her gait, in her posture, even in how she breathed. ~ Heru Ptah

I've always had an artistic hand. I took on paint when I started falling in love with the abstract expressionists. I approached it from a physical standpoint, but I've also been honing my compositional eye through film. ~ Billy Zane

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language. ~ Roy Blount, Jr.

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
~ Nicola Chiaromonte

abstract himself out of the moment ~ Gregory Benford

A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost. ~ David Foster Wallace

How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach? ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness ~ Willem De Kooning

I always just been a fan of the music ... and the aesthetic only in an abstract sense. ~ Colin Marston

Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into light, texture, shape and shadow. ~ Herb Ritts

It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing ... for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality ... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. ~ Isaac Asimov

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness - the black gangster, the black rioter - that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract - The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Art is not about beauty, art is an expression. ~ Vikram Roy

The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute. They are released from any already existant thing in nature and their content lies in themselves. ~ Naum Gabo

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence. ~ Rene Dubos

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. ~ Edmund Burke

Christ did not found an abstract religion, a mere school of religious thought. He setup a community of apostles, of teachers, with the task of spreading His message and so giving rise to a society of believers: His Church. He promised the Spirit of truth to His Church and then sent Him. ~ Pope Paul VI

Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation. ~ James Weldon Johnson

And for that second, the world shrinks to just us. Just his face and mine. Every smell seems to evaporate. Every color ceases to exist. And there's a silence. I silence so laden with fear and mistrust that it turns everything else abstract and us both to stone. ~ Caz Frear

That the objective world would exist even if there existed no conscious being certainly seems at the first blush to be unquestionable because it can be thought in the abstract, without bringing to light the contradiction which it carries within it. But if we desire to realize this abstract thought, that is, to reduce it to ideas of perception, from which alone (like everything abstract) it can have content and truth, and if accordingly we try to imagine an objective world without a knowing subject, we become aware that what we then imagine is in truth the opposite of what we intended, is in fact nothing else than the process in the intellect of a knowing subject who perceives an objective world, is thus exactly what we desired to exclude. For this perceptible and real world is clearly a phenomenon of the brain; therefore there lies a contradiction in the assumption that as such it ought to exist independently of all brains. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society . ~ Alfred North Whitehead