“The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.”

— Edward Hopper

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

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Edward Hopper 48

prominent American realist painter and printmaker 1882–1967

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "English and the Discipline of Ideas" (1920), p. 66

“The conflict between the theories of Surrealism & pure abstraction leads many to look upon one as black & bad & the other as white & good. Yet it seems to me that a good work of art has always contained both abstract & surrealist elements – just as it has both classical & romantic elements (order & surprise?)... Surrealism is widening the field of contemporary art & is giving more freedom to the artist (& perhaps what is not unimportant, – stretching the appreciation of the public). Abstraction is re-establishing fundamental laws; bringing back form to painting & sculpture. There are many products of surrealism which I personally dislike,.... but equally Unimportant to me are the empty decorations produced in the name of abstraction.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), pp. 112-113

“The one art that is abstract and pure enough to have the one problem and possibility, in our time and timelessness, of the 'one single grand original problem' is pure abstract painting. Abstract painting is not just another school or movement or style but the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and un-entangled, styleless, universal painting. No other art or painting is detached or empty or immaterial enough.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Source: 1956 - 1967, Art-as-Art Dogma' part II, (1964), p. 157

“The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

As quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York, 1990, p. 138
1940's, Art and Architecture (1944)

“Well, painting today certainly seems very vibrant, very alive, very exiting. Five or six of my contemporaries around New York are doing very vital work, and the direction that painting seems to be taken here – is – away from the easel – into some sort, some kind of wall, wall painting…”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 144

“Fautrier's exhibition [in Paris 1945] made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Source: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, pp. 23,28: quote in Dubuffet's letter to Jean Paulhan (letter 108)

“Art in India was never the same after her comet like appearance. There are only a few moments in the history of art which pinpoint a new departure, a new direction. Such a moment in the history of modern Indian art was the appearance in the mid-thirties of Amrita Sher-Gil with whose paintings contemporary paintnig in India took shape and demonstrated the possibility of a contemporary style and expression that were, at the same time, of the soil and in direct continuation of the great national past.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Ruby Von Leiden in amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), 7 December 2013, Learnpunjabi.org http://www.learnpunjabi.org/eos/AMRITA%20SHER-GIL%20%281913-1941%29.html,

“Purity" of and in art — any art, including music and dance — is an illusory notion, of course. It may be remotely conceivable or imaginable, but it can't be realized because it can't be recognized any more than a "pure" human being or a "pure" (or, for that matter, gratuitous) act can be. All the same, for Western art in its Modernist phase "purity" has been a useful idea and ideal, with a kind of logic to it that has worked, and still works, to generate aesthetic value and maintain aesthetic standards as nothing else in our specializing culture has over the last hundred-odd years.But this logic has also worked to exclude the decorative — the decorative insofar as it functions solely as decoration. It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on "absolute" or "autonomous" art: thus on visual art — including even architecture — that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not. Decoration is asked to be "merely" pleasing, "merely" embellishing, and the "functional" logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such "mereness.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins....
"Detached Observations" http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/detached.html, Arts Magazine (December 1976)
1970s

“.. paint was always [in history of painting] a means to an end, whether the end was religious, social, decorative or romantic. Now it's become an end in itself..”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote in 'Artist's Voice', Kuh; as cited in Outside the Lines, David W. Galenson, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 109
posthumous

“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think.... of art as a situation of comfort.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Original: Original in Dutch: Kunst lijkt me nooit volledig of zuiver te maken. Het is of ik altijd verwikkeld ben in het melodrama van de alledaagsheid. [...]
Source: Quote of De Kooning from Beyond the Aesthetic, Robert Motherwell, Design 47, April 1946, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 101.

“The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.”

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Edward Hopper 48

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