Piet Mondrian Quotes

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.

...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.

The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.

I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it is possible to fall to utmost ruin, and consequently, how these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies.

With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.

When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me.

How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature.

perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.