Morton Feldman > Quotes

“What was great about the '50s is that, for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.”
― Morton Feldman

“Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.”
― Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings

“I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.”
― Morton Feldman

“Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.”
― Morton Feldman

“I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful.”
― Morton Feldman

“Wonderful aphorism - but we can't take refuge in aphorisms.”
― Morton Feldman

“Here it’s more like they know you exist, so they don’t have to play you. In Italy they like me. In France I’m hardly known, and when I'm played, they don’t care for it. Once Charles Munch [also one-time Boston Symphony maestro] was a listener at a concert where one of my works was played. He came over and kissed me. Put his arm around me and kissed me. He said, “You are a poet.” But he will never play me.”
― Morton Feldman

“At a party Larry Rivers complained of the heat. Feldman said, “You're a painter — break a window.”
― Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings

“Recently I heard news from Europe that Boulez is adopting the chance techniques of John Cage and perhaps myself. Like Mathieu, he is going
to show us Katzenjammer Kids how an ambitious Frenchman can really do it. It was easy for Napoleon to reach Moscow. And it will be curious to observe Boulez straggling home to Darmstadt.”
― Morton Feldman

“To tell about a man’s life by anecdote is swinish – yet history is now beginning to file away those peculiar sentiments that make glamour out of unhappiness, and unhappiness out of art.

With Pollock, we have a double tragedy – both death and a life in the art world came too soon.

Jackson, oh Jackson – we did not know you. Why do we feel it is our fault. Why is it that we make this terrible separation from what a man does and what a man is, from what a man should do, and from what a man can’t do. And how we watched you, El Matador, waiting for the slaughter or the glory.”
― Morton Feldman

“Kierkegaard says that all speculative philosophy cannot equal in complexity the dialectic of a woman who has been deceived. He goes on to explain that such a woman cannot find an object for her pain, because love cannot grasp the thought that it has been deceived. In art, it is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his work goes badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma — the paradox. Is it lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence against it, because he needs this lie to exist in his art.”
― Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings

“The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew — a very great painter — and told him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper, “That son of a bitch — he did it.” I understood. With this supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era and walked away with it.”
― Morton Feldman

“Music’s tragedy is that it begins with perfection.”
― Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings