The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works
October 1, 2009–May 2, 2010
Themes and Quotes
Scrape:
"For about a year now, I have been unable to [do] anything in my painting but
scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process I don’t actually
reveal what was beneath." —Gerhard Richter, 1992
Concentricity:
"The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout
nature this primary figure is repeated without end." —Ralph Waldo
Emerson, "Circles," 1841
"The viewer is persuaded by his senses that he occupies the center of the world around him—a world he changes at will as he moves through it." —Rudolf Arnheim, art theorist, The Power of the Center, 1988
Line:
"A line on its own has almost become a work of art." —Theo van
Doesburg, artist and critic
"Lines connect or divide, measure, mark, or merely extend themselves. In their more unruly moments they coil and bend, even snarl and knot. They can also scribble or write." —Nancy Foote, art critic, "Drawing the Line," 1976
Gesture:
"Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator…must become
a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked." —Harold
Rosenberg, art critic, "The American Action Painters," 1952
Art on Art:
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." —T. S. Eliot, The
Sacred Wood, 1920
"Whatever else art is good for, its chief effectiveness lies in propagating more art." —Leo Steinberg, art historian, "The Glorious Company," 1978
Drip:
"If Picasso drips, I drip." —Arshile Gorky, 1934
"You can’t do a painting without a drip." —Andy Warhol, 1961
Stripe to Zip:
"Music establishes an order between man and time. The stripe establishes an order
between man and space." —Michel Pastoureau, historian, The
Devil’s Cloth, 1991
"I feel that my zip does not divide my paintings. I feel it does the exact opposite." —Barnett Newman, 1970
Figure or Ground:
"You can never have the use of the inside of a cup without the outside—the
inside and outside go together. They’re one." —Alan Watts, philosopher,
c. 1970
"Actually all is space, form as well as what we see as empty space." —Piet Mondrian, "Toward the True Vision of Reality," 1941
Monochrome:
"It is gray we need . . . made of bright and black, able to shed the former,
or the latter, and be the latter or the former alone." —Samuel Beckett, The
Unnamable, 1953
Picture the Frame:
"Art is limitation. The essence of every picture is the frame." —G.
K. Chesterton, cultural critic, Orthodoxy, 1908
"The rectangle is a great human invention." —Brice Marden, 1978
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