Mordicai Gerstein Quotes

What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

I will say that a lot of art, some of the best art, has very powerful and meaningful messages behind it, and the more you read the stuff on the walls, the more you learn the artist's intention, and you have a totally new point of view of what it's about.

When art works travel from place to place, what you have is the opportunity to engage with the intellect of another person who has made a thing that should have enough information in it in the way it's constructed to start thinking about why that picture got made - not why it is relevant to you.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

I'm using the grid as formation. I wanted a relationship between the paintings and videos so that way when you are looking at the videos there's a direct relationship to the paintings.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Color cannot stand alone.

What do you think of this" he asked, indicating the painting nearby. She gave him an odd look. "I think it's an enormous painting of a dog." He made a show of considering the picture and nodded seriously. "An astute observation.

I organize the opposition between colors, lines and curves. I set curves against straight lines, patches of color against plastic forms, pure colors against subtly nuanced shades of gray.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.