Sigfried Giedion Quotes

Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted.

Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.

Only since the turn of the century has abstraction again become recognized as an artistic means of representation. It was then that one returned to the recognition of the immense role abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.

Art, indeed, began with abstraction.

The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon.

Even when dead, the hog largely refuses to submit to the machine.