Quotes About Modernism

I think 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon' is one of the most transfixing paintings of all time. And it was made by a monster of a man.

I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shrivelling heads!

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

a personal relationship in an impersonal world

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

En el mundo de la pintura, todos esperaban innovaciones e ideas nuevas, pero, en el mundo de la música, con un entorno mucho más conservador, no había espacio para las nuevas ideas. El mundo de la música seguía obsesionado por una «música moderna» que tenía más de cincuenta años. Aquella reflexión supuso para mí un momento de liberación.

If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

There was, when I came to New York in the 1970s, no more profound or moving experience than MoMA, an almost perfect piece of 20th Century modernist expression, existing in an extraordinary balance - modestly, functionally, elegantly - with the extraordinary art it held. This place changed my life. I was transformed by every visit.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

Finally Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.

Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived for virtually his entire life, was the eye of the storm of this modernism; and was the birthplace of the linguistic philosophy that came to dominate the twentieth century.

Cultural evolution is synonymous with the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.

Modernism is an error which is still making its appearance under various new guises, wholly inconsistent with any genuine religious expression. It is surely an attempt on the part of secular philosophies and secular trends to vitiate the true teaching and discipline of the Church of Christ.

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

They do not understand that the proper antipode and effective antidote to modernism (theological liberalism) is not Fundamentalism, but Calvinism.147

True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters.

True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste.

As a modern woman, there are things I take for granted, and that shows up in the way I sit, the way I walk, the way I think, and what I know to be possible.

Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.

the New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother's generation. (…) She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny.