Kenmerken van het modernisme zijn: experimenteel, radicaal, readymade, primitief, het onderbewustzijn, internationaal, expressieve waarheid, kunst en kunstnijverheid en het onderbewustzijn.
Citaten over modernisme
“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.”
D. H. Lawrence
“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”
“Jackson Pollock, with his passionate hurlings and dribblings of paint, is its outstanding producer of "verbs."
“Piet Mondrian, with his precisely defined, irreducible images of right angles and primary colors, is modernism's champion painter of "nouns."
Theodore F Wolff
“Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.”
Brian Appleyard (b. 1951), British author. The Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts, ch. 6 (1984).
“You are born modern, you do not become so. “
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, “Astral America,” (1986, trans. 1988).
“Not “Seeing is Believing” you ninny, but “Believing is Seeing.” For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”
Tom Wolfe (b. 1931), U.S. journalist, author. The Painted Word, ch. 1 (1975).
“True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science but not its wrong application to life.”
“The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize”
Rabindranath Tagore quotes (Indian Poet, Playwright and Essayist, Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, 1861-1941)
“Because a work does not aim at reproducing the natural appearance it is not... an escape from life... it may be a penetrating into reality... a stimulation to greater effort in living.”
Henry Moore
“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
“One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), U.S. poet. Opus Posthumous, “Adagia,” (1959).
