Piet Mondrian Quotes

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up.

I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don’t quite know where it comes from.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle pictures of the Sunday newspapers.

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.

I love sculpture, and minimal sculpture is really my favorite stuff, but I wasn't very good at it, and I don't think in a three-dimensional way.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

I didn't really start appreciating Picasso until a few years back. I didn't like him at all. But now I can see this world is crazy.

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.