Piet Mondrian Quotes
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Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.
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To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.
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Instinct reveals itself as self-concentrating, self-edifying it is limitation. Intuition produces self-denial, self-destruction； it is expansion. Culture can develop both. If it develops instinct, animal nature appears. Then culture destroys the intuitive capacity which men have even found in a primitive state.
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It is the same with art. Art will become the product of another duality in man: the product of a cultivated externality and of an inwardness deepened and more conscious. As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form.
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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.
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You can so wonderfully be yourself here in Paris.
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The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation, although the latter does always indicate the universal to a degree, or at least conceals it within.
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Kandinsky points out in his book On the Spiritual in Art that Theosophy (in its true sense; not as it generally appears) is yet another expression of the same spiritual movement which we are now seeing in painting.
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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.
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The new plastic idea thus correctly represents actual aesthetic relationships. To the modern artist, it is a natural consequence of all the plastic ideas of the past. This is particularly true of painting, which is the art least bound to contingencies. The picture can be a pure reflection of life in its deepest essence.
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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.
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I often sketched by moonlight in the 1890's - cows resting or standing immovable in flat Dutch meadows, or houses with dead, blank windows. I never painted these things romantically, but from the very beginning I was always a realist.
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Subjectivity ceases to exist only when the mutation-like leap is made from subjectivity to objectivity, from individual existence to universal existence.
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Many appreciate in my former work just what I did not want to express, but which was produced by an incapacity to express what I wanted to express - dynamic movement in equilibrium. But a continuous struggle for this statement brought me nearer. This is what I am attempting in 'Victory Boogie Woogie.'
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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.
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The desire for freedom and equilibrium (harmony) is inherent in man (due to the universal in him).
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Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!
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Everything is expressed through relationship. Colour can exist only through other colours, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal thing.
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The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.
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The abstract human mind will have to receive the intended impression by its own means. I always confine myself to expressing the universal, that is, the eternal (closest to the spirit) and I do so in the simplest of external forms, in order to be able to express the inner meaning as lightly veiled as possible.
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A form must be of its own time if it is to be recognized: one cannot relate to what one is not or does not have – Thus all that is of the past is to be rejected.
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In Paris, I quickly mastered the Foxtrot, the Shimmy and the One Step, he liked the Shimmy best: At first, the heel-toe was sort of tricky. Nowadays, they find ways around it.
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I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.
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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.