Henry Moore Quotes

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

Many say that no real avant-garde - which I'll define as a combative group of free-thinking artists - can exist anymore. The media's reach is too vast. New artists and movements get snatched up too quickly.

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

The Futurists were an art movement in the early 20th century which basically glorified machines and the Industrial Revolution.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

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

I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.