Piet Mondrian Quotes

The colored planes, as much by position and dimension as by the greater value given to color, plastically express only relationships and not forms.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

Color cannot stand alone.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.

I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do. I couldn't forget Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, I mean that was the basis.

The relation of color and the relation of proportion are both based on the relation of position.

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.

The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.