Quotes About Abstractionists

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

Ah, you realists! I am not ashamed of my romanticism. Ah, you, abstractionists: I will confess to you my passion for objects, earth, nature. Should I pretend I am a stone when emotions, memories surge and overflow me, and I am dreaming of home, and melting snow?

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.