Quotes About Modernism

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience.

God is forgotten, the mighty dollar has taken his place and the mechanic cannot ease the troubled soul. The road is closed. Under circumstances such as these America only increases speed. America will not stop for anything, it wants to get on, go on, forge a way ahead. Should America turn back? Absolutely not! It simply increases the pace a hundredfold, acts the hurricane and whips life up to a white heat. In Europe nowadays we have the word Americanism, the old days had festina lente.

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist "chaos" of the painting, asked Picasso: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this!"

Si je juge infantile l'idée d'un couple ouvert à tous les courants d'air, je n'ai pas beaucoup d'estime non plus pour les couples qui sentent le refermé ; et je n'ai que mépris pour le couple à l'ancienne, fondé sur la soumission de la femme à l'homme, ou sur la castration de l'homme par la femme, ou les deux à la fois.

Karl May stylizes the Apaches—in crucial alliance with German immigrants like Old Shatterhand, Old Surehand, and (of course) Old Firehand ("head forest ranger by profession, forced to leave Germany for political reasons that caught many an honest man in their whirl"27 )—as a kind of bulwark of nobility against modern capitalism and Yankee individualism, which are subverting and undermining traditional German/Indian values.

The very ground on which the structure of 20th-century fundamentalist theology and politics was built has crumbled into sand. The reason for which modern fundamentalism was created—in opposition to modernism and liberal theology—has been swept away in the avalanche of new ideas, in new dialogue between different faith traditions.

Fundamentalists like Norris were calling for a new struggle to preserve Southern values, Southern religion, Southern culture, and the Southern way of life. And this new battle against modernism was more critical and historically significant even than the Lost Cause of the 19th century, fought to defend the God-given rights of Southern white people to own black slaves.

As the struggle against modernism picked up steam, the nativism and anti-Catholicism of fundamentalists such as Norris assured leaders of the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan that their enterprise had been blessed by God.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

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 a huge David Hockney fan.

Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.

I am only satisfied insofar as I feel 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' is a definite progress, but even about this picture I am not quite satisfied. There is still too much of the old in it.

Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine. —Bob Samples, The Metaphoric Mind

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.

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

Il razionalismo moderno fa come gli struzzi: mette la testa sotto terra per nascondersi, e si ritiene soddisfatto se riesce a drogare milioni e milioni di uomini con le «istruzioni per l'uso»