Quotes & Sayings About Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). — Jerry Saltz

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! — LeRoy Neiman

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties. — Nora Ephron

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don DeLillo

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. — Henry Flynt

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks. — Joni Mitchell

When I was growing up, nothing unpleasant was shown in the home. And when I was in art school, the only art that was presented to me was Abstract Expressionism. But I was interested in the grim stuff. It seemed more exciting. — Peter Saul

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? — J.M.K. Walkow

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art. — Andy Warhol

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! — Kurt Vonnegut

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. — Robert Rauschenberg

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? — Radhika Mukherjee

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. — Mark Rothko

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. — Aaron Huey

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades ... It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop ... — Robert Indiana

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. — Robert Motherwell