Matisse Quotes
In 1964 I was at school, planning to study economics and sociology, when curiosity took me to the Tate Gallery to see an international survey exhibition of contemporary art. It brought together the painting and sculpture of the previous decade, beginning with the late works of the modern masters, Matisse and Picasso, and concluding with the twenty-seven year olds Allen Jones and David Hockney. I was bowled over. Suddenly, art was not just Turner and Constable, or Leonardo and Michelangelo, but objects of considerable size and brilliant colour, dealing with the sensations, subjects and issues of the Sixties.
Nicholas Serota
I admired and felt the anonymous structure of the work of Brancusi, Vantongerloo, Arp, and Taeuber-Arp [the wife of Hans Arp] whose studios I visited. [Kelly frequently visited Hans Arp and his wife in Paris and discussed his fresh-made art with them intensively]. Their work reinforced my own ideas for the creation of a Pré-Renaissance, European type art: its anonymous stone work, the object quality of the artifacts, the fact that the work was more important than the artist's personality. Of the Europeans, I mostly admired the way Picasso, Klee and Brancusi 'made' their art. Contrary to what has been said about me, Mondrian and Matisse did not interest me when I was in Paris. Mondrian's [paintings] could not be seen in Paris and when I did see them in Holland in 1953, I thought their structure too rigid and intellectual.
Ellsworth Kelly