Piet Mondrian Quotes
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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.
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It is not important to make many pictures but that I have one picture right.
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Composition allows the artist the greatest possible freedom, so that his subjectivity can express itself, to a certain degree, for as long as needed.
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The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.
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Environment, education, experience, make men conscious of passing reality but overwhelm their intuitive capacity when this is not very strong.
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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.
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By turning from the surface, one comes closer to the inner laws of matter, which are also the laws of the Spirit.
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The free placement of the means of expression is a privilege enjoyed exclusively by painting different opinion with Theo van Doesburg . The sister arts, sculpture and architecture, are more restricted in this respect. The other arts enjoy even less scope in their employment of the means of expression.
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As tradition, the female element clings to the old art and opposes anything new - precisely because each new art moves further away from the natural appearance of things.
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Art is the path to being spiritual.
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One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.
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The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.
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It has become progressively clearer that the plastic expression of true reality is attained through dynamic movement in equilibrium. Plastic art affirms that equilibrium can only be established through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.
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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.
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The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external) things become more and more automatic, and we observe that our vital attention fastens more and more on internal things.
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'Masculine and feminime, vertical and horizontal.
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The first thing to change in my painting was the color c. 1908-09. I forsook natural color for pure color. I had come to feel that the colors of nature cannot be reproduced on canvas. Instinctively I felt that painting had to find a new way to express the beauty of nature.
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However, new plasticism is pure painting in contrast with the opinion of Theo van Doesburg, then: the means of expression still are form and color, though these are completely interiorized; the straight line and flat color remain purely pictorial means of expression.
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The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.
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The positive and negative states of being bring about action. They cause the loss of balance and of happiness. They cause the eternal revolutions - the changes that follow one upon the other. They explain why happiness cannot be achieved in time.
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Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating 'expression' of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.
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All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.
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..the Place de l'Opera in Paris gives a better image of the new life than many theories. Its rhythms of opposition, twice repeated in its two directions, realizes a living equilibrium through the exactness of its execution.
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We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.