"Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.. .. [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.. ..this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place. [Motherwell is quoting here the comments of w:Henri Focillon on Japanese legends of 'accidentalism']"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
PrintmakersPainters from the United StatesHarvard University alumniStanford University alumniPeople from Washington (state)
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
The Dada Painters and Poets, Schultz, Wittenborn, New York 1951, p. xxxvii
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Motherwell
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
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.
45 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Robert Motherwell →
Related Quotes
"Before 1940 there was relatively little abstract art in America. Most of it was relatively geometric versions of Cubi…"
"Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science…"
"The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'ob…"
"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 t…"
"One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again."
"The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel throug…"
"[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of co…"
"The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to rev…"
"It is Cezanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives…"
"Plastic automatism.. ..as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is…"