Piet Mondrian Quotes about Art

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

It is a task of art to express clear vision of reality.

It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.

Why should art continue to follow nature when every other field has left nature behind?

The only problem in art is to achieve a balance between the subjective and the objective.

I think you too recognize the important relationship between philosophy and art, and it is just this relationship that most painters deny. The great masters do grasp it, unconsciously; but I believe that a painter's conscious spiritual knowledge will have a much greater influence upon his art, and that it would be due only to a weakness in him, or lack of genius, should this spiritual knowledge be harmful to his art.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

If you follow nature you will not be able to vanquish the tragic in any real degree in your art... We must free ourselves from our attachment to the external, for only then do we transcend the tragic, and are enabled consciously to contemplate the repose which is within all things.

Art on the contrary sought this harmony in practice [of art itself]. More and more in its creations it has given inwardness to that what surrounds us in nature, until, in Neo-Plasticism, nature is no longer dominant. This achievement of balance may prepare the way for the fulfillment of man and signal the end of (what we call) art.

The purer the artist's 'mirror' is, the more true reality reflects in it. Overseeing the historical culture of art, we must conclude that the mirror only slowly is purified. Time producing this purifying shows a gradual, more constant and objective image of reality.

In art the search for a content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual.

Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty. The more determinately (consciously) this recognition is experienced, the more intense our happiness. The more determinately (consciously) this union with the universal is felt, the more individual subjectivity declines.

The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to followoneparticular path. And if wefollow it, it isnotthe sign of anunconscious act.On the contrary, it showsthat there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness.