Quotes by Piet Mondrian

“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.Piet MondrianThe Artist's Way A Spiritual Path to Greater Creativity by Julia Cameron”

“I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.”

“Things are beautiful or ugly only in time and space. The new man's vision being liberated from these two factors, all is unified in one unique beauty.”

“The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.”

“Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the tru...”

“The positive and negative states of being bring about action. They cause the loss of balance and of happiness. They cause the eternal revolutions - the changes that follow one upon the other. They ...”

“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.”

“I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.”

“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 ...”

“Art is the path to being spiritual.”

“Everything is expressed through relationship. Colour can exist only through other colours, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regar...”

“I often sketched by moonlight {in the 1890's] - cows resting or standing immovable in flat Dutch meadows, or houses with dead, blank windows. I never painted these things romantically, but from the...”

“When I first saw the work of the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Van Dongen and the Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.”

“With that work [Mondrian is referring to his figurative painting 'Devotion' he painted in 1908, of a devotedly looking girl] I only envisaged a girl conceived devotedly.. ..and by giving the hair t...”

“I believe that in our period it is definitely necessary that, as far as possible, the paint is applied in pure colours, set next to each other in a pointillist or diffuse manner. This is stated str...”

“For the present at least [1909] I shall restrict my work to the ordinary world of the senses, since that is the world in which we still live. But nevertheless art even now form a transition to the ...”

“He [ Jan Toorop, an older and famous Dutch religious painter] sees the Catholic faith as A. Besant, [a British Theosophiste and women's right activiste, then] views it in its primeval period: the C...”

“The first thing to change in my painting was the color [c. 1908-09]. I forsook natural color for pure color. I had come to feel that the colors of nature cannot be reproduced on canvas. Instinctive...”

“It was during this early period of experiment that I first went to Paris. The time was around 1910 when Cubism was in its beginnings. I admired Matisse, Van Dongen and the other Fauves, but I was i...”

“'Masculine and feminime, vertical and horizontal.”