Quote

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

— Piet Mondrian

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

— Teresa de Lauretis

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

— Joaquin Phoenix

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.

— Max Bill

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

— Lucian Freud

They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

— Constantin Brancusi

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

— Lee Krasner

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

— Jerry Saltz

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

— Jean Piaget

✗Opposing Perspectives

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

— Josef Albers

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

— Tom G. Palmer