A Quote by Peggy Guggenheim

I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art. — © Peggy Guggenheim
I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.
The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.
Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests.
All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.
There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"
The first thing I remember is Alexander Calder - our school took us on a field trip to go see the Calder mobiles, and that always stuck in my memory.
Art gives a sense of order, life is basically chaotic, and there's a tension between them. A sense of order comes from chaos and contains a bit of it, but it's the sense of order that is important in a work of art.
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.
You know, back when I was a kid who wanted to be in show business, everybody on TV wore nice clothes. They were very glamorous when they would be on the 'Tonight Show.' All the dudes wore suits and ties and that just seemed like real show business to me.
I'll be your minister--" "Of the exchequer? You'd rob me blind." "I would never steal from you," he'd said hotly. "Oh? Where is my tourmaline necklace? Where are my missing earrings?" "That necklace was hideous. It was the only way to keep you from wearing it." "My earrings?" "What earrings?
Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics.
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements.
Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.
I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.
Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.
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