Modernism Quotes - Page 2

• Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Alzheimer's, Postmodernism, Alzheimer

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• Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license to look at them quickly - to consume them and move on.

  James Elkins

  Moving, Giving, Looks

  "Are Artists Bored by Their Work?" by James Elkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 15, 2010.

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• Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world.

  Hans Rookmaaker

  Spiritual, Art, Two

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• Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.

  Tom Turner

  Art, Labels, Landscape

  Tom Turner (2014). “City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning”, p.11, Taylor & Francis

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• Painting is... a correspondence between what you are and what you see. It's a moment when something is holding together in such a way that it is a universe in itself... Within this is a test and also a judgment upon yourself, your capabilities, your promises, and the part that you play in the world. And nobody else can test that for you. Certainly not the Museum of Modern Art.

  Milton Resnick

  Art, Museums, Play

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• I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted.

  Jean Cocteau

  Girl, Mother, Teacher

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• I never did calligraphy... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism... It's part of that asceticism.

  Paul Rand

  Calligraphy, Different, Asceticism

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• Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

  Alexander Stoddart

  Art, Facts, Kind

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• I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong.

  Georges Braque

  Thinking, Painting, Kind

  "Letters of the Great Artists - From Blake to Pollock". Book by Richard Friedenthal, 1963.

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• I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.

  Arnold Friberg

  Art, Confused, Ambition

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• Surface is a modernist concept. What surface does is to encourage one to see the painting as object rather than as a window on the world.

  Kay WalkingStick

  Doe, World, Painting

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• That is why my pictures don't look like modern art. It's some sort of timidity on my part I'm sure.

  Paula Rego

  Art, Looks, Modern

  John McEwen, Paula Rego (1992). “Paula Rego”

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• I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.

  Ellsworth Kelly

  Art, Painting, Window

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• 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

  Art, Order, Abstract

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• This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told, 'You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it.

  Anthony Burgess

  Art, Boys, Age

  Televised BBC interview, 1968.

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• History reveals that left-brain people have been creating art for a long time now.

  David Luiz

  Art, Creating, Long

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• Too many modern painters set themselves satisfied with just a coincidence, the spot in its raw, meaningless form.

  Pierre Alechinsky

  Coincidence, Modern, Form

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• A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

  Elias Canetti

  Men, Lice, Add

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• While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Art, Airplane, Innovation

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• Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Work, Merit

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• And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

  John Crowe Ransom

  Undefined

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• A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Firsts, Modern, Ends

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• Postmodernism lives in the academy, where words abandon reality to serve ambition, and reputations rise on hot air.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Ambition, Reality, Air

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• Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

  Larry Wall

  Science, Thinking, Literature

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• It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art.

  James Elkins

  Art, Irrelevance, Ifs

  James Elkins (2011). “What Photography Is”, p.124, Routledge

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