it was the Cubist who created the space and color that
everywhere today assails our eyes
in uniform architecture and monotonous
design; the various branches of modern art
through tedious & exhaustive experiment
& research creating a massive cultural sinkhole
whose banal discoveries unveil for all the sameness
of form, line and color;
Quote from Gorky's 'Camouflage', 1942: I like the heat;
the tenderness; the edible; the lusciousness;
the song of a single person
in a bathtub full of water.
I like Ucello, Grunewald, Ingres,
the drawings and sketches for paintings
of Seurat and that man Pablo Picasso;
I measure all things by weight.
In text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series,
26 June 1942
I love Mougouch, Gorky's wife. What about papa Cézanne;
I like the wheat fields, the plow, the apricots,
those flirts of the sun. And bread above all.
My lever is the purple; About 194 feet away
from our house in Armenia on the road to the
spring my father had a little garden with
a few apple trees which had retired
from giving fruit;
this garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment'
often I had seen my mother and the other village women
exposing their naked bosoms, taking the soft,
dependable ******* in their hands &
rubbing them on the rocks; above all this
standing an enormous tree all bleached
under the sun, rain & cold, deprived of leaves.
This was the Holy Tree [quoted in 1942]
In text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series,
26 June 1942
I don't like that word 'finished'.
When something is finished,
that means it's dead, doesn't it?
I believe in everlastingness;
I never finish a painting – I just stop
working on it for a while.
I like painting because it's something
I can never come to the end of;
sometimes I paint a picture,
then I paint it all out. Sometimes
I'm working on fifteen or twenty
pictures at the same time; I do that
b/c I want to – b/c I change my
mind so often; The thing to do is
always to keep starting to paint;
never finishing the painting [quoted in 1948]
