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

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 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.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.

So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

They that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company.

A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy.

I don’t like [to] make a woman … an abstract concept of the fashion. I don’t like [to] say, “You must wear that.” … I am not a dictator.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.