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| Balthus The Card Game 1948-50 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"One can imagine a time when the painters who no longer mix their own colors will find it infantile and unworthy to apply the paint themselves and will no longer consider the personal touch, which today still constitutes the value of their canvases, to possess anything more than the documentary interest of a manuscript or autograph. One can imagine a time when painters will no longer even have their color applied by others and will no longer draw."
– Louis Aragon (1930), from an essay later translated by Michael Palmer and published in The Surrealists Look at Art (Lapis Press, 1990)
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| Roberto Matta The Dazzling Outcast: The Where at Floodtide 1966 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"If today an abstract painter seems to draw like a child or a madman, it is not because he is childish or mad. He has come to value as qualities related to his own goals of imaginative freedom the passionless spontaneity and technical insouciance of the child, who creates for himself alone, without the pressure of adult responsibility and practical adjustments. And similarly, the resemblance to psychopathic art, which is only approximate and usually independent of a conscious imitation, rests on their common freedom of fantasy, uncontrolled by reference to an external physical and social world. By his very practice of abstract art, in which forms are improvised and deliberately distorted or obscured, the painter opens the field to the suggestion of his repressed interior life. But the painter's manipulation of his fantasy must differ from the child's or the psychopath's in so far as the act of designing is his chief occupation and the conscious source of his human worth; it acquires a burden of energy, a sustained pathos and firmness of execution foreign to the others."
– Meyer Shapiro (1937) from an essay later reprinted in Abstract Possible edited by Maria Lind (Mexico City, 2011)
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| Francis Bacon Portrait of George Dyer in a mirror 1968 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Those venerable men, many of whom were clergymen and monks, devoted the skill of their hands that God had given them exclusively to divine and holy stories, and imparted such a serious and sacred spirit and such a humble simplicity to their work as is appropriate to consecrated objects. They made the art of painting into a faithful servant of religion and knew nothing of the vain pomp of colors which is the pride of artists today . . ."
– Wilhelm Wackenroder (1796) from an essay later quoted in The Preference for the Primitive by E.H. Gombrich (Phaidon, 2002)
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| Roberto Matta The Dazzling Outcast: The Blinding Exile 1966 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"The painting should be constructed completely with pure plastic elements, that is to say, with planes and colors. A pictorial element has no other meaning than what it represents; consequently the painting possesses no other meaning than what it is by itself."
– Theo van Doesburg (1930) from The Basis of Concrete Painting, a manifesto written collectively with several other artists
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| Giordio Morandi Still-life 1948-49 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
". . . Morandi's initial enthusiasm for Fascism had been transformed into indifference, though never into opposition. Giorgio Castelfranco (who had purchased the only painting that Morandi sold from Giosi's show in 1919) would later write: 'By 1930 the majority of Italian intellectuals tolerated the Fascist dictatorship . . . they were attached to the routine of everyday life as they went ahead with their work . . . From a political standpoint, this was an amputated ethos, but one that could be lived with in order to make survival possible.'"
– Janet Abramowicz (2004) from her book Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence
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| Max Ernst Solitary and Conjugal Trees 1940 oil on canvas, decalcomania Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Why put up with it? Because we want what only this risk has been able to give us. Of course, what we want from many of the forms of our culture is comfort and continuity, a sense of connection to enduring traditions, a respite from the relentless clocks that drive our individual lives. But, in modern society, we also live with a sharply ambivalent, painfully keen awareness that our lives are irremediably different from those of the past. We rise each day to a particular mix of sharpened pleasures and deepened anxieties that quickens our sense of separation from other days – a century ago, a decade ago, two years ago. This arouses in many of us a hunger for a culture that affirms this sensation, by giving us new forms that give shape to our feelings, our moment in history – as distinct from the feelings of our forebears, even of our youth. We torment (and flatter) ourselves with the belief that it has not all been said, that life as we live it is more complex than has until now been articulated. And in order to allow room for the new cultural forms we feel might be adequate to this vivifying hubris and doubt, we are willing to accept the destruction of past cherished norms, to endure large measures of disorientation in the present, and to sift through a great deal of dreck."
– Kirk Varnedoe (2003) from the lecture Why Abstract Art? later reprinted in Pictures of Nothing (Princeton, 2006)
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| Roberto Matta The Dazzling Outcast: Where Madness Dwells 1966 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"In an age of cynicism about politics, society and the relationship of art to social change, it is refreshing to encounter these works and propositions, and to recall a period when artists were committed to a radical transformation of their environment. Our enthusiasm for the modernist project in Europe is inevitably clouded by our knowledge that those ideals of purity and hygiene were translated – inevitably, it seems – into concentration camps and genocide. And in the United States, the history of high modernism has become rarified to such an extreme degree that we find it hard to extract a strand of idealism from an increasingly market-led art system. In the case of Latin America, the modernist project was certainly a failure in that dreams of development and progress were swept away by decades of dictatorship and social conflict, but modernism was also saved from association with social engineering and nationalist triumphalism."
– Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (2007) from the introduction to Geometry of Hope
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| Alfred Manessier Blue and red composition (Seascape) 1949 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"It is absolutely untrue that my work depends on literary impulse or has any illustrative intention. The marks on the canvas are the sole and essential agents in a series of relationships which form the structure of the painting. They should be so complete as to need, and allow of, no further elucidation. The basis of my paintings is this: that in each of them a particular situation is stated. Certain elements within that situation remain constant. Others precipitate the destruction of themselves by themselves. Recurrently, as a result of the cyclic movement of repose, disturbance and repose, the original situation is re-stated."
– Bridget Riley (1965) from the essay Perception is the Medium, later reprinted in The Mind's Eye (Thames & Hudson, 2009)
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| Edward Hopper The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet 1944 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"In 1924, André Breton wrote that for him the most effective image was the one with the highest degree of arbitrariness."
– Lucy R. Lippard (1966) from the essay Eccentric Abstraction
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| Wilfredo Lam Woman, bust-length ca. 1939 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"The rise of the intellectual stock of architecture accompanied the decline of belles lettres like a lengthening shadow; the opening of any new signature building attracted more visitors and media attention than the newly published translation of the latest unknown Nobel Prize winner. I would like to see a match between Seamus Heaney and Frank Gehry, but it is at least certain that postmodern museums have become at least as popular as the equally postmodern new sports stadia and that nobody reads Valéry's essays any more, who talked about space beautifully from a temporal point of view but in long sentences."
– Fredric Jameson (2003) from the essay The End of Temporality
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| Emil Nolde Glowing Sunflowers 1936 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"If we examine the daily life of a middle-class person in the United States or Europe, we get a picture of an existence of extraordinary hermeticism. People live in sealed houses or condos in highly controlled landscapes. They travel in the sealed environment of the automobile along the abstract pathways of the highway to equally artificial office parks and shopping malls. When one speaks of abstract art, it is essential to remember that it is only a reflection of a physical environment that has also become essentially abstract."
– Peter Halley (1991) from the essay Abstraction and Culture
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| Ernst Wilhelm Nay Polychrome 1959 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Excesses of experience become the fragments for the future."
– Emily Roysdon (2009) from Ecstatic Resistance (typographic poster work)
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| Raoul Dufy At the races ca. 1930-35 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"The more horses you put to, the faster your progress – not of course in the removal of the cornerstone from the foundations, which is impossible, but in the tearing of the harness, and your resultant riding cheerfully off into space."
– Franz Kafka (1918) translated by Michael Hofmann from the Zurau Aphorisms (Schocken, 2006)
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| Pablo Picasso Bullfight 1934 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Being the opposite of abstraction, construction begins in the most primitive manner, but it is dangerous for the artist to fall in love with primitivism. The elementary methods of construction are related to the elements of life, the forces of life."
– Kenneth Martin (1964) from the essay Construction from Within