Ross Feld:
Mark Rothko:
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
Ad Reinhardt:
Abstract Painting, 1963, oil on canvas, 60" x 60"
There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.... a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art.
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Philip Roth:
Stanley Kunitz:
Philip Guston, Green Sea, 1976:
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