Abstract Expressionism Quotes

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!

In the 1960s, when abstract expressionism was the reigning style, those art students who tended to be sullen, brooding, and antisocial were thought by their teachers to be very creative.

...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.

It is impossible for a man to think of something without matching his abstract idea with physical object.

Is it Abstract, Fauvism, Expressionism, Mannerism, Impressionism? Close but no, this is Naturalistic Fantasy. A movement where science, fantasy, philosophy and art come together. Is it possible to mirror our fantasy, which often is based on nature, then turn it to an art work, which once is complete become nature again? Should we call it Fantaisie Naturaliste?

In 1972, Bayber's work underwent another metamorphosis, yet refused to be defined by or adhere to any specific style. Elements of abstract expressionism, modernism, surrealism, and neo-expressionism combine with figurative art to create works which remain wholly original and highly complex, both delighting and terrifying at a subconscious level. There is nothing fragile here, nothing dreamlike. No protections are offered, not for the artist himself and not for those viewing his work. All is called forth in a raw state, human values finessed on the canvas, softened and sharpened, separated and made aggregate. While there are certain motifs in these works- often a suggestion of water, the figure of a bird- and various elements are repeated, aside from an introverted complexity, the context in which they appear is never the same from one piece to the next. What ties these works together is the suggestion of loss, of disappearance, and of longing ( see figs. 87-95)" The figure of a bird. He had forgotten his own writing. Finch took the book back to his desk and pulled a magnifying glass from the top drawer to study the color plates. Thomas had completed six paintings in 1972, four of them after July. In each of those four, Finch managed to find what he had seen long ago, the figure of a bird. Was it Alice, flown away from him?

Shum fan of abstract expressionism—Pollock. Gonna paint walls with yer blood. Splatter red and bone marrow.” There’s a first time for everything. Like meeting a troll who can make a better highbrow art joke than you can.

In Walked Jim September 2013: Entering his first morning staff meeting as FBI director, Jim Comey loped to the head of the table, put down his briefing books, and lowered his six-foot-eight-inch, shirtsleeved self into a huge leather chair. He leaned the chair so far back on its hind legs that he lay practically flat, testing gravity. Then he sat up, stretched like a big cat, pushed the briefing books to the side, and said, as if he were talking to a friend, I don’t want to talk about these today. I’d rather talk about some other things first. He talked about how effective leaders immediately make their expectations clear and proceeded to do just that for us. Said he would expect us to love our jobs, expect us to take care of ourselves … I remember less of what he said than the easygoing way he spoke and the absolute clarity of his day-one priority: building relationships with each member of his senior team. Comey continually reminded the FBI leadership that strong relationships with one another were critical to the institution’s functioning. One day, after we reviewed the briefing books, he said, Okay, now I want to go around the room, and I want you all to say one thing about yourselves that no one else here knows about you. One hard-ass from the criminal division stunned the room to silence when he said, My wife and I, we really love Disney characters, and all our vacation time we spend in the Magic Kingdom. Another guy, formerly a member of the hostage-rescue team, who carefully tended his persona as a dead-eyed meathead—I thought his aesthetic tastes ran the gamut from YouTube videos of snipers in Afghanistan to YouTube videos of Bigfoot sightings—turned out to be an art lover. I really like the old masters, he said, but my favorite is abstract expressionism. This hokey parlor game had the effect Comey intended. It gave people an opportunity to be interesting and funny with colleagues in a way that most had rarely been before. Years later, I remember it like yesterday. That was Jim’s effect on almost everyone he worked with. I observed how he treated people. Tell me your story, he would say, then listen as if there were only the two of you in the whole world. You were, of course, being carefully assessed at the same time that you were being appreciated and accepted. He once told me that people’s responses to that opening helped him gauge their ability to communicate. Over the next few years I would sit in on hundreds of meetings with him. All kinds of individuals and organizations would come to Comey with their issues. No matter how hostile they were when they walked in the door, they would always walk out on a cloud of Comey goodness. Sometimes, after the door had closed, he would look at me and say, That was a mess. Jim has the same judgmental impulse that everyone has. He is complicated, with many different sides, and he is so good at showing his best side—which is better than most people’s—that his bad side, which is not as bad as most people’s, can seem more shocking on the rare moments when it flashes to the surface.

All “is” statements expressing judgment become more accurate (describe the instrument used to make the evaluation) when rephrased as “seems to me” statements: “Beethoven seems better to me than Punk Rock,” “Punk Rock seems better to me than Beethoven,” “Abstract Expressionism seems like junk to me,” “Abstract Expressionism seems to me the most important innovation since Cubism” all speak a “truth” — in the sense of the truth of experience or the truth of perception — even though different people will speak them. (Ah, alas, Gross and Levitt detect sinister “perspectivism” rearing its head again . . .)

In my work, we find the direct consciousness of an essential humanity. Monet shared this quality and for that I prefer Monet to Cézanne....

All my life’s work will drain away without ever being realized. For a sculptor, working with their hands is crucial and hands must be supported by a strong and supple back. And I work with sturdy materials that need dexterity and strength to handle — metal and stone and sometimes even bricks! How do I do any of it now?

son favored abstract expressionism.

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

The Latvian painter has a special love for diffused outdoor light which seems to penetrate the bodies and emanate from them," a light that reappears within, and from behind, Rothko's paintings, an illumination glimpsed through a hazy doorway or window, a light longed for but beyond reach.

The Latvian painter has a special love for diffused outdoor light which seems to penetrate the bodies and emanate from them," a light that reappears within, and from behind, Rothko's paintings, an illumination glimpsed through a hazy doorway or window, a light longed for but beyond reach.

Then, it was easier to build the need for love and sex into the end-all purpose of life, avoiding personal commitment to truth in a catch-all commitment to "home" and "family." . . . . Irwin Shaw, who once goaded the American conscience on the great issues of war and peace and racial prejudice now wrote about sex and adultery; Norman Mailer and the young beatnik writers confined their revolutionary spirit to sex and kicks and drugs and advertising themselves in four-letter words. It was easier and more fashionable for writers to think about psychology than politics, about private motives than public purposes. Painters retreated into an abstract expressionism that flaunted discipline and glorified the evasion of meaning. Dramatists reduced human purpose to bitter, pretentious nonsense: "the theater of the absurd." Freudian thought gave this whole process of escape its dimension of endless, tantalizing, intellectual mystery: process within process, meaning hidden within meaning, until meaning itself disappeared and the hopeless, dull outside world hardly existed at all. As a drama critic said, in a rare note of revulsion at the stage world of Tennessee Williams, it was as if no reality remained for man except his sexual perversions, and the fact that he loved and hated his mother.

1940s in The Tiger’s Eye—a short-lived, adventuresome magazine that also featured work by Pollock, Rothko, and Still

aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds.

Expressionism was an artistic symptom of the trauma World War I brought to Europe. A stylized, severe, and serious aesthetic, it emphasized abstractions and angles, an attempt to express off-kilter and intense emotional content rather than balanced, symmetric, mundane realism. Caligari production supervisor Rudolph Meinert enlisted artists Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Rohrig to create a completely artificial and exaggerated set design for Caligari. They painted all the settings in flat perspective on the canvas, including bolts of light and shadow. Everything, even outdoor scenes, was shot inside cramped studio confines. The result was a claustrophobic style that was to permeate not only the horror film, but would percolate into film noir as well. The style is nightmarish, a physical embodiment of the madness overtaking the characters externalized, an artistic effort that’s a sustained attack on the senses that’s just as disturbing as the story it tells—the result? The first great horror film.

Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching "modernization" to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: "managed democracy," "conservative modernization." Then he steps back, smiling, and says: "We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself." And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle. Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only "simulacrum" and "simulacra" . . . and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra," in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov's genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representations to validate tranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

There are no more fundamental rules, no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure. In the aesthetic realm of today there is no longer any God to recognize his own. Or, to use a different metaphor, there is no gold standard of aesthetic judgement or pleasure. The situation resembles that of a currency which may not be exchanged: it can only float, its only reference itself, impossible to convert into real value or wealth. Art, too, must circulate at top speed, and is impossible to exchange. 'Works' of art are indeed no longer exchanged, whether for each other or against a referential value. They no longer have that secret collusiveness which is the strength of a culture. We no longer read such works - we merely decode them according to ever more contradictory criteria. Nothing in this sphere conflicts with anything else. Neo-Geometrism, Neo-Expressionism, New Abstraction, New Representationalism - all coexist with a marvellous facility amid general indifference. It is only because none of these tendencies has any soul of its own that they can all inhabit the same cultural space; only because they arouse nothing but profound indifference in us that we can accept them all simultaneously.

There were brave and patriotic COLLECTORS who created a little flurry of activity on the Abstract Expressionist market in the late 1950s, but in general this type of painting was depreciating faster than a Pontiac Bonneville once it left the showroom. The resale market was a shambles. Without the museums to step in here and there, to buy in the name of history, Abstract Expressionism was becoming a real beached whale commercially. The deep-down mutter-to-myself truth was that the COLLECTORS, despite their fervent desire to be virtuous, had never been able to build up any gusto for Abstract Expressionism. Somehow that six-flight walk up the spiral staircase of Theory took the wind out of you.

He knew what was going on in painting in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. Abstract Expressionism, Pop-Art, Minimal, Op-Art, Less-is-More, Flat, all the avant-garde idiocies. But Maitland paid no attention to it. He went his way. Traditional. Representational. If he painted a tit, it was a tit.

Life is a photo album. Loaded with some black and white memories, some colorful dreams, some abstract expressionism and some out of focus images.

In the decades that followed, a succession of schools—Impressionism, Post-Impression, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism—developed theories as far removed from Manet as Manet had been from Alberti. The idea of the artist as a Bohemian outsider came out of this revolution, as did the contempt that artists would develop for the public, an obsession with self-expression and iconoclasm, and the rejection of classical standards of beauty as an objective of art. Abstraction is a meta-invention that has much to answer for. But in its first flush and at its best, it produced works from 1850 to our cutoff point of 1950 that have so far survived the test of time as judged by the opinions of experts, prices in the auction room, and popularity in the museums. The