Piet Mondrian Quotes
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Human culture reveals an opposition: diminution of the instinctive faculties and development of the intuitive capacity. A cultivation of instinctive faculties produces human degeneration; a cultivation of intuitive capacities creates human progress.
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Only conscious man can mirror the universal: he can consciously become one with the universal and so can consciously transcend the individual.
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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.
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I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.
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..the elements of form have a particular aspect; every fragment, every plane, every line has its proper character.
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It may be noted that in Neo-Plastic art the crucial thing is the right angel, that is, the right-angle lines. And not whether the position of the lines is vertical or horizontal.. .So it is possible to make very beautiful things while placing the lines in a diagonal position.
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This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color.
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In his later works Doesburg tried to destroy static expression by diagonal position of his lines. But in this way the feeling of physic equilibrium which is necessary to enjoy a work of art is lost.
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Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.
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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.'
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I very much like Arp's things. I consider him the only 'pure' artist after Neo/Plasticism.
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The position of the artist if humble. He is essentially a channel.
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These universal means of expression were discovered in modern painting by a logical and gradual progress toward ever more abstract form and color. Once the solution was discovered, there followed the exact representation of relations alone, that is to say, of the essential and fundamental element in any plastic emotion of the beautiful.
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Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
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Well, I think my paintings are fast enough already...
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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.
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Dear Does = Theo van Doesburg , thank you for your letter.. .I was glad to know that in principle you are in favour of the diamond hanging Mondrian's painting, he made in 1919, hanging in a rhombus and I think that in practice you will approve of this method for some of my things. You look at the thing painting itself, and not only the outward appearance..
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Nature moves me deeply; I paint nature (now) only in a different way..
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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.
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Reality only appears to us tragical because of the disequilibrium and confusion of its appearances.
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That is what we are against the ancient-Greek ideas about art, because that is the key to the classic and tragic finality from which we must free ourselves.
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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.
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It is not important to make many pictures but that I have one picture right.
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It is of small importance whether De Stijl still exists as a 'group'; a new style was born, a new aesthetic created; it needs only to be understood – and cultivated.