Some Quotes About Abstract Art

Here are a few quotes about abstract art. If you are an abstract artist or a collector of abstract art and are sensitive about such things, I recommend that you avoid reading Al Capp's comment on abstract art.

Joseph Albers

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Al Capp

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Lucian Freud

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Wasilly Kandinsky

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

Wasilly Kandinsky

Abstract painting leaves behind the "skin" of nature, but not its laws. Let me use the "big words" cosmic laws. Art can only be great if it relates directly to cosmic laws and is subordinated to them.

Paul Klee

The more horrifing the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Ben Laposky

My work in computer art is a form of oscillography, the results of which I have called 'Oscillons' or 'Electronic Abstractions.'... The oscillons have been recognized as being the first major development in this field as abstract art creations, and the first to be widely exhibited and published in America and abroad.

Manfred Mohr

My artistic goal is reached when a finished work can visually dissociate itself from its logical content and convincingly stand as an independent abstract entity.

Pablo Picasso

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Frank Stella

Kandinsky was right to appreciate Cézanne. The emergence of triangularity in the ‘Large Bathers’ was an unconscious step in the right direction, a step about to break through the crust of the future’s pictorial surface. However, agile and muscular as it may have been, Cézanne’s triangle could not shake the pyramid anchoring Raphael’s composition. The dogged perseverance of this pyramid illuminates the mystical dead weight which Kandinsky and all abstract painting following him have always had difficulty accounting for, and which in the end we, if not they, cannot live without.

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