Cy Twombly Quotes

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.

I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

I have been known as the minimal and conceptual artist for over five decades. I think I haven't changed much.

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

Minimal art went nowhere.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.

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.

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.

I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

I love Nicolas de Stael particularly, and my work can remind people of him. But looked at attentively, our works are not similar at all.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.

The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.