abstract art and the real
indeed, abstract art never would have been invented, except as the result of the most obstinate and sensitive effort to go with art’s grain. abstract art is not something, as are certain modes of surrealism — though not all — that a literary or philosophical mind would have imaged a priori. in this sense, abstract art is not invented or arbitrary at all, but found, found in the sensitive, passionate, and profoundly accurate — in terms of feeling — adjustments that constitutes this immediate act of painting which is an effort, often clumsy and sometimes desperate, like a blind swimmer, to cover the abyss, the void that the world sometimes presents, with our love, with our sensuality and passion, our sense of commitment to a mode of expression that becomes ideal, when it does, only because it is so deeply rooted in the real. it is this sense of abstract art’s reality that mondrian must have had in mind when he remarked on his own art, “squares? i see no squares in my pictures,” and led him, at the end of his life, to speak of his art as a new realism.
ca. 1950’s from: the collected writings of robert motherwell, university of california press 1992
a glance back at motherwell. [redirecting] revisiting his pertinence and awareness. being aware of such pertinence — such direction — such space.