Painters From The United States

"Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didn't know it."

"I have a definite feeling for the West, the vast horizontality of the land, for instance.. .I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their colour is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn't intentional; probably [it] was the result of early memories and enthusiasm."

"The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd.. .And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country."

"I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end.. .Thus the fact that good European moderns [European artists who lived in the U.S. because of the Nazi-regime] are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. These idea interests me more than these specific artists do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Joan Miró, are still abroad."

"My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on; in this, it was better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition. At the same time Benton introduced me to Renaissance art. [remark on his former art-teacher w:Thomas Hart Benton ]"

"I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident.."

"Technic is the result of a need new needs demand new technics total control denial of the accident States of order organic intensity energy and motion made visible memories arrested in space, human needs and motives acceptance"

"When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a short of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

"My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West."

"It came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it. [1947, on his painting 'She wolf']"

"I believe easel painting to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is toward the wall picture or mural.."

"As to what I would like to be. It is difficult to say. An Artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts. People have always frightened and bored me, consequently I have been within my own shell and have not accomplished anything materially."

"Certainly I know that he [Jackson] did see the Indians doing sand paintings. You know, that's a fact. But I don't know why he chose to work on the floor. All I can say is that he did.. .He would never have said, 'That's why I am working on the floor, because I saw the Indians' sand painting.'. But I've heard him say that he did see the Indians' sand painting. I think by now that's been established. I wouldn't know why he worked on the floor, but obviously that was the way he worked. And that's that!.. .No, I didn't work on the floor."

"To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical."

"His chief difficulty was with the basic art of drawing."

"He [Pollock] had an intuitive sense of rhythmical relations. He knew what counted.. .Even as an utter novice he never made anything ugly."

"A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor.. .There was complete silence.. Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee [ Lee Krasner, his wife] and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter.. .My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'"

"He [Pollock] is the one who would pull me out of a state when I would say, 'the work has changed and I can't stand it. It's just like so and so's work.' Then he would come [they lived and worked together] and look and say, 'You are crazy, It is nothing like so and so's work. Just continue painting and stop hanging yourself up.' We had that kind of rapport."

"George Grosz gave a fantastic testimony of Berlin life during a terrible period, divided between fascism and communism. He was active in the communist party but had an anarchist's fascination for the characters of underground life. Military figures, prostitutes and violence abound, and fascinate the viewer.. ..this meant he instinctively rooted his art in the common people. It also explains, I think, why caricature and graphic design in magazines and newspapers held such an appeal for him."

"[Grosz] publicly stated that he was neither Christian nor pacifist, but was actively motivated by an inner need to create these pictures", and was finally acquitted after two appeals."

"The court ordered the artist Grosz to pay a fine of 300 marks and the publisher Herzfelde to pay 600 marks, ordered the plates and printing forms to be confiscated and destroyed, and assigned publication rights to the ministry - Dada!"

"This cynic is a secret moralist. Negation is merely his manner of speaking; what he really.. ..loves is the positive. One might think: one little push, and he would he painting pictures full of ecstasy and mysticism. It is his personal bad luck that he is condemned to be a caricaturist. In any case he is never going to be a humorist like Wilhelm Busch, one of the comfortable kind. There is no telling that he will become. For the time being we recall the old saying that yes and no are very close neighbors, in life and in art."

"My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry."

"A great deal that had become frozen within me in Germany melted here in America and I rediscovered my old yearning for painting. I carefully and deliberately destroyed a part of my past."

"A composition should be simple and clear. That is why the drawings of children and primitives are so strong."

"Yes, [to] the Communist party! [the presiding judge asked Grosz: 'Do you belong to a political party?']"

"Árt is dead. Long live Tatlin's new machine art."

"I see the future development of painting taking place in workshops.. ..not in any holy temple of the arts. Painting is manual labor, no different from any other. It can be done well or poorly."

"Art today is an absolutely secondary matter. Anyone who is able to look further than the walls of his own studio can see this.. .All the same, art is a business that demands a very clear decision from anyone who undertakes it. It is not immaterial where you stand in this business.. .Are you on the side of the exploiters or on that of the masses, who want to wring the exploiters' necks?"

"Day after day gasped away, slowly seep hours when fettered or immured, only at times does imagination scale the palisades that the spirit of chaos and confusion, the spirit of reactionary bombast, has set up around us - dreams, dreams of endless, destructive hate! Mists of hate, beclouding the burning brain!"

"I am lonely without measure; that is to say, I am alone with my doubles, phantasms in whom I realize specific dreams, ideas, inclinations, and so on. I rip three other people out of my inner life, give them names, and believe in them myself. Gradually three clearly defined types have emerged: *1: Grosz. *2: Count Ehrenfried, the nonchalant aristocrat with the well-manicured fingernails, concerned only with cultivating himself; in a word, the detached, aristocratic individualist. *3: The physician. Dr. William King Thomas, the more American, practical counterweight to Grosz the mother figure."

"But while he [Grosz] painted all this violence, we can see from his first drawings onward that he had an ambivalent attitude towards it: he rejected it, and at the same time was fascinated by it. In this respect, he has had some influence on what I do. Grosz's ambivalence is something that I have in myself.. .This is a great paradox of art and literature – what is despicable in life can be very attractive and appealing in art. You nourish yourself with everything that you hate."

"Some of the names Grosz gave himself in letters written between 1913 and 1920 are "Prof Thomas," "Ritter von Thorn," "Gogo," "Dr. Maschin George Ventil," and, complete with place of residence "Lord HattonDixon, New Castle Town," and "Edgar H. Hussler, Boston." He often signed drawings with "Boff" (or "Boffel" or "Fobb"; see number 6 of 'Gott mit uns'); this was a variation on "Boeuf," which was his friends' nickname for him. There is often an element of Dadaist alienation and also of straightforward in this, but not always."

"The relative meaning of two physical facts in an emotionally controlled relation always creates the phenomenon of a third fact of a higher order, just as two musical sounds, heard simultaneously create the phenomenon of a third, fourth or fifth. The nature of this higher third is non-physical. In a sense it is magic. Each such phenomenon always overshadows the material qualities and the limited meaning of the basic factors from which it has sprung. For this reason Art expresses the highest quality of the spirit when it is surreal in nature; or, in terms of the visual arts, when it is of a surreal plastic nature."

"A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments."

"The significance of a work of art is determined then by the quality of its growth. This involves intangible forces inherent in the process of development. Although these forces are surreal (that is, their nature is something beyond physical reality), they, nevertheless, depend on a physical carrier. The physical carrier (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the Surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit."

"This two-way transformation proceeds from metaphysical perceptions, for metaphysics is the search for the essential nature of reality. And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality. Such is the magic act which takes place continuously in the development of a work of art. On this and only on this is creation based."

"Hofmann had a heavy hand, a virtual inability to hold back, whether he was spreading planes of paint across a surface or drawing his own features with firm, broad strokes of a thick pen. Much of his extant work turns the volume to fortissimo, from the rapidly worked 'wet-into-wet' interiors of the 1930's to the abstractions of the 1950's and 1960's, in which patches of paint and emphathic shreds of drawing appear to have been slapped on to the canvas or squeezed directly from the tube."

"[being a young woman-artist in the w:Artists Club in New York]... .How did I feel, like how? I felt, you know, when I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn't paint, the way all the men said they [the women] couldn't paint.. ...Hans Hofmann was very supportive - of me. I used to run into him in the park. I'd be dog-walking at nine in the morning, he'd say, 'Mitchell, you should be painting.' Very nice. [both chuckle] I don't think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the 'lady painter.'"

"And I came [to New York, 1945].. ..to study with Hofmann.. .And I went to Hofmann's class and I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified. But he and I became friends later on. Friends, but I never studied with him.."

"When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock [her husband] and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was — one of the questions he asked Jackson was, 'do you work from nature?' There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, 'I am nature.' And Hofmann's reply was, 'Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself.' To which Jackson did not reply at all."

"Walking into his home was like walking into one of his paintings; the floor was kelly green, the furniture painted in yellows, reds, pink, white etc. Fresh fruit and flowers, perhaps a wicker rocker. Always a joy."

"A passionate teacher, he got his students to work! I studied with Hans for three weeks in Provincetown, summer 1950. Having had a thorough lesson in Cubism well before I knew him, perhaps I was never one of his many student disciples but a great admirer. To this day I think he remains extremely overlooked as an artist and an influence."

"Hofmann's abstraction is hard won: it comes from depicting the world around him. Over the years his paintings cover a vast territory: they are uneven in quality, various in style; he paints his own history of the most relevant 20th Century art, a kind of Hofmannesque Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism."

""Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface'" (Arp). Only love — for painting, in this instance — is able to cover the fearful void."

"Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture ... black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface."

"A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops."

"as quoted in Jackson Pollock, Ellen G Landau, p. 259, as quoted in Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Ines Janet Engelmann, Prestel Verlag Munich, 2007, p. 66"

"[visiting Jackson Pollock’s studio]: You do not work from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself. You work by heart, not from nature. [Pollock reacted: 'I am nature]"

"Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus — not imitation.. .From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life — all movement and rhythm — time and light, color and mood — in short, all reality in Form and Thought."