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Modern Quotes

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Modern Quotes

“The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.”

“I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.”

Men Art Enough Modern Theory Studios Painter Throat Nails Wire Contradictory Modernism Brass Modern Art Ostriches

Book:D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles

Source: D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles

“For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.”

World Years Art Faces Steps Modern Objects Depends Elements Hundred Moved Leaving Painter Arrangements Hostility Monument Modernism Imitating Superb Incessant

Book:The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell

Source: The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell

“The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.”

Source: Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters

“Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.”

Has Beens Art Used Born Modern Source Art Is Photographer Painter Modernism Copyright Modern Art Upheaval

Book:EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston

Source: EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston

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

Form Modern Satisfied Painter Spots Meaningless Coincidence Modernism

Author:Pierre Alechinsky

“When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.”

Artist Lost Modern Faults Technique Painter Expenses Sincerity Principal Strokes Preoccupation

Author:Joaquin Sorolla

“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”

Writing Process Modern Effects Higher Draws Painter Novelists Accomplishment Disregard Subordinates Simplification Unlearn

Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art

Source: Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art

“If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.”

Ifs Feels Made Artist Term Modern Ideals Perfection Importance Notion Confusion Painter Masterpiece Qualms Qualms About

Author:Andre Malraux

“Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... ...Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.”

Light Eye Today Night Next Vision Darkness Modern Painting Essentials Shadow Shining Paint Painter Museums Accustomed Innate Daylight Luminous Radiant Predecessors

Author:Umberto Boccioni

“Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.”

Should Looks Reality Past Artist Challenges Path Generations Modern Color Painter Imperfection Modern Life Brutality New Generation New Paths Didactic

Author:Charles Baudelaire

“Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it.”

“When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.”

Novel Modern Honesty Movement Painting Notion Starting Enormous Painter Distinguished Playwright Bourgeois Baudelaire

Author:J. G. Ballard

“We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. The lesson of Vietnam, I think, should be that never again will young Americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as possible.”