“Art is art. Everything else is everything else.”

My paintings are the last paintings one can make.

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that ‘first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

The more an artist works the more there is to do.

That’s an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are.

I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.

There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you’d want to suggest someplace, but there’s no place. I wouldn’t know where to send a student to study.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more

Making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea… The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.

My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.