“This one is too elegant, too shiny, like jewelry. It seeks applause. This is clear to me, but difficult to explain, which is what makes abstraction so fascinating. In one sense, abstract art is absolutely nothing, stupid. In 100 years, maybe people will just think it's garbage. But somehow we see something in it; we have a sense of quality. [searching for an illustration of his point, Richter leafs through a catalog to find some of his 'gray monochromes']. I was doing these [monochromes] when I was getting divorced. When you feel totally empty, you do this - but then I saw that one picture was actually better than another. Both were miserable, but the difference was interesting. I loved this: that there must be something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility that we find in abstraction. But it is impossible to describe.”

—  Gerhard Richter

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

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Gerhard Richter 96
German visual artist, born 1932 1932

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Gerhard Richter photo

“It is instinctive to search for something. Abstract art is inherently about the search - and about not finding anything. My gray monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes. I want them to be seen as narratives - even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

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“It was in 1947 that the idea of a conscious monochrome vision came to me... Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see', to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me; absolute freedom! But each time I could neither imagine or think of the possibility of considering this as a painting, a picture, until the day when I said: Why not?”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Source: before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings", p. 15

“When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 310
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“I hope it is clear…that the ways in which pitches represent pitch classes, and the ways pitch classes abstract pitch, must be examined in order to describe any kind of musical sense or progression, and that if one steps back into abstracted considerations derived without respect to such concerns, an understanding of the qualities of musical uniqueness will continue to be suppressed in favor of generalizations, which at best evoke a vague sense of what a piece may be doing, perhaps in common with some other pieces, but not what one piece is doing, all by itself.”

Paul Lansky (1944) American composer

Lansky, Paul (1975). Pitch-Class Consciousness, Perspectives of New Music XIII/2 (Spring-Summer).

Isa Genzken photo

“.. you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time... But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken' (2009)

“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 exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Source: 1956 - 1967, Art-as-Art Dogma' part II, (1964), p. 154

“Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? – 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It's not an idea, it's a sense of something you know, a demarked place. Somehow I think I always thought of it going that way, rather than an idea of a narrowing triangle going to the center of the earth… I have nothing to do with Conceptual art [in contrast to his Physical Art, as Carl Andre called his sculpture art already in 1969]]. I'm not interested in ideas. If I were interested in ideas, I'd be in a field where what we think in is ideas… I don't really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way. [quote from a talk with the audience, December 1969]”

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Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 12

Gerhard Richter photo

“They [Richter always works on a number of his abstract paintings at the same time] feed off one another… At the beginning, I feel totally free, and it's fun, like being a child. The paintings can look good for a day or an hour. Over time, they change. In the end, you become like a chess player. It takes me longer than some people to recognize their quality, their situation - to realize when they are finished. Finally, one day I enter the room and say, 'Checkmate.' Then sometimes I need a break, a quiet job, like a landscape. But I always need to paint abstracts again. I need that pleasure.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

“What can be called "consciousness of the process of abstraction." That is, consciousness of the fact that out of a virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories. What we abstract, i. e., "see," and how we abstract it, or see it, or see it or think about it, is for all practical purposes inseparable from how we talk about it.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

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“There are people who have made me see shapes — and others I thought of a great deal, even people I have loved, who make me see nothing. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

1970s, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)

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