“The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming... I take any material whatsoever if the picture demands it. When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form etc., I play off material against material, wood against sack clothes.”

Schwitters (1921) in: Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London 1990, p. 68-69.
1920s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Feb. 13, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming... I take any material whatsoever if the pictur…" by Kurt Schwitters?
Kurt Schwitters photo
Kurt Schwitters 32
German artist 1887–1948

Related quotes

Zach Galifianakis photo

“I want to combine the NAACP with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It's called Mothers Against the Advancement of Colored People.”

Zach Galifianakis (1969) American actor and comedian

Live at the Purple Onion (2007)

Yves Klein photo

“I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, Yves Klein: Long live the Immaterial, Delano Greenidge Edition, New York, 2001. p. 74
from posthumous publications

Morarji Desai photo

“Earthquakes generate elastic waves when one block of material slides against another; the break between the two blocks being called a fault.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

Explosions generate elastic waves by an impulsive change in volume in the material. Small explosive charges are used in controlled-source seismic experiments in which the waves penetrate only a few kilometres into the earth.
[Seismology and plate tectonics, 1990, http://books.google.com/books?id=tZRxPzwoChIC&pg=PA12] (p. 12)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

Gautama Buddha photo

“Any kind of material form whatever, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all material form should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.””

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Sutta 62, verse 3, p. 527
Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses)

Emil Nolde photo
Malcolm X photo

“I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Interview (January 1965?)
By any means necessary: speeches, interviews, and a letter (1970)
Context: I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.

Adolphe Quetelet photo

“Ought charges of materialism to be brought against him who points out that regularity?”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)
Context: I have always comprehended with difficulty... how persons pre-occupied doubtless by ideas, have seen any tendency to materialism in exposition of a series of facts deduced from documents. In giving to my work the title of Physics, I have had no other aim than to collect, in uniform order, the phenomena affecting man, nearly as physical science brings together the phenomena appertaining to the material world. If certain facts present themselves with an alarming regularity, to whom is blame to be ascribed? Ought charges of materialism to be brought against him who points out that regularity?

Related topics