Words matter. These are the best Piet Mondrian Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Subjectivity ceases to exist only when the mutation-like leap is made from subjectivity to objectivity, from individual existence to universal existence.
Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but feels and thinks.
It is not important to make many pictures but that I have one picture right.
The desire for freedom and equilibrium (harmony) is inherent in man (due to the universal in him).
I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.
Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating ‘expression’ of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.
The spiritual (i.e. the supersensory) has many degrees; thus, the term ‘spiritual’ is used both for the scale of degrees away from the physical towards the spirit, but also only for the spiritual proper.
If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures – but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist’s own art.
All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.
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.
Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
Let us note that art – even on an abstract level – has never been confined to ‘idea’; art has always been the ‘realized’ expression of equilibrium.
We must look not to the negative (the misery, the bestial in life), although we undergo it and sympathize with it, but rather to the burgeoning life around us, which is strengthened by the negative.
Reality only appears to us tragical because of the disequilibrium and confusion of its appearances.
Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.
By turning from the surface, one comes closer to the inner laws of matter, which are also the laws of the Spirit.
The clarification of equilibrium through plastic art is of great importance for humanity. It reveals that although human life in time is doomed to disequilibrium, notwithstanding this, it is based on equilibrium. It demonstrates that equilibrium can become more and more living in us.
All that is base in the masses is temporary, no doubt serving only to prevent evolution (that of the elite, as well) from proceeding too quickly and thus not becoming ‘reality.’
Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.
Art is the path to being spiritual.
If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.
I do not know how I shall develop, but for the present, I am continuing to work within ordinary, generally known terrain, different only because of a deep substratum, which leads those who are receptive to sense the finer regions.
Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract – like the mathematical – is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.
Things are beautiful or ugly only in time and space. The new man’s vision being liberated from these two factors, all is unified in one unique beauty.
The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.
I am only satisfied insofar as I feel ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ is a definite progress, but even about this picture I am not quite satisfied. There is still too much of the old in it.
Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!
True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm.
The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult – if not impossible – to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.
