Dutch - Artist | March 7, 1872 - February 1, 1944
If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.
Piet Mondrian
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We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.
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Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
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Reality only appears to us tragical because of the disequilibrium and confusion of its appearances.
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The position of the artist if humble. He is essentially a channel.
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The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.
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It has become progressively clearer that the plastic expression of true reality is attained through dynamic movement in equilibrium. Plastic art affirms that equilibrium can only be established through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.
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To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.
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I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.
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The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.
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Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!
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Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but feels and thinks.
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