“It is, of course, a luxury to create art and . . . to insist on expressing one’s own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game . . . one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.
Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome. Politics is an odd game, not without danger I have been told, but certainly sometimes amusing. To eat and to drink are habits not to be despised but often connected with unfortunate consequences. To sail around the earth in 91 hours must be very strenuous, like racing in cars or splitting the atoms. But the most exhausting thing of all—is boredom.
So let me take part in your boredom and in your dreams while you take part in mine which may be yours as well.
To begin with, there has been enough talk about art . . .”
Max Beckmann (1884-1950), “On My Painting,” 1938
“The logic of life does not tolerate permanent revolutions. There are possible on paper . . . The most dizzying experiments are permissible, but even in Art the logic of life arrests the experiments as soon as they have reached the point when the death of the experimental objects becomes imminent . . .”
“The apparently ideal companionship between Form and Content in the old Art was indeed an unequal division of rights and was based on the obedience of the Form to the Content. This obedience is explained by the fact that all formalistic movements in the history of Art, whenever they appeared, never went so far as to presume the possibility of an independent existence of a work apart from the naturalistic content, nor to suspect that there might be a concept of the world which could reveal a Content in a Form.
This was the main obstacle to the rejuvenation of Art . . .”
Naum Gabo (1890-1977), “The Constructive Idea in Art,” 1937
