Top 130 Modernism Quotes & Sayings

Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.

Modernism probably wouldn't have happened without lesbians in Paris.

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

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.

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

Secular humanism proposes ... the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism ... what is necessary for it to occur is a ... New Enlightenment.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

The beginning, middle, and end are parodied, reversed, and hidden by modernism, but not abandoned.

I remain interested in the potential of art, except I've always been more struck by applied modernism than high modernism. It's partly because of feminist theory and being brought up in the '70s, with questioning who is speaking, and why, and what authority they're carrying.

Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

My work as a painter has always been tied to Modernism. I read everything I could find related to art, from Paul Cézanne through the 1950s.

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.

I used to be called a post-modern clown. But now, post-modernism is a quaint notion, too.

I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.

Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

Modernism was a big thing for me, coming from a father who was very interested in art, music and culture - and almost always Italian art, music and culture. One good thing about Italians is that culture is part of everyday life. But Modernism is a movement of the past. The idea of a Modernist building as a sculpture set on a pedestal of grass is a part of Modernism that I'm not so crazy about.

There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things.

Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins.

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of 'modernism.'

When I read the documents relative to the Modernism, as it was defined by Saint Pius X, and when I compare them to the documents of the II Vatican Council, I cannot help being bewildered. For what was condemned as heresy in 1906 was proclaimed as what is and should be from now on the doctrine and method of the Church. In other words, the modernists of 1906 were, somewhat, precursors to me. My masters were part of them. My parents taught me Modernism. How could Saint Pius X reject those that now seem to be my precursors?

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's.

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.

I'm really a fighter against modernism equaling brutalism.

Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism... and as things turned out, it was.

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

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

Because of the need to remove all modernism, we stayed in the middle of nowhere all day long, living out of tents. It was cold. It definitely set the scene.

'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.

In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled 'Inside the Whale,' about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and 'Tropic of Cancer.'

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which we condemn, no less decidedly than we condemn theological modernism.

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.

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our own.

Short attention span is the new avant-garde. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. David Markson feels particularly relevant now. Twitter is the revenge of modernism.

Post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy. The idea that you have to deconstruct and destroy all grand narratives is not a good one.

If exposure of body is modernism, then animals are more modern than humans.

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

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

I don't much like post-modernism, because post-modernist has become the basket in which every mediocre person can shuffle things and pretend to do something significant, and we could also mention who use post-modernism in this way - maybe we shouldn't.

When God-given, heaven-sent revival does come, it will undo in weeks the damage that blasphemous Modernism has taken years to build.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

I don't like post-modernism. It's cynical, and takes no discipline - you just copy. It doesn't allow a film to be open to reality.