Iris Apfel Quotes

Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

When I look back now, it must have been like Paris was at the time of Le Sacre du Printemps.

We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess.

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

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

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.

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.

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

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

I feel that, historically, the Art Deco period has the most resonance for me. As a person, it has to be the plucky Clara Bow, the heroine of American silent movies of the 1920s. She embodied feminine dressing mixed with men's style. All this then evolved into the exquisite style and simplicity of Coco Chanel.

As a kid, I wanted to be part of the Lost Generation who came to France.

For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

I know absolutely nothing about the 20th Century.

The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.

It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'

In the early '20s, with the war over, there was a period of celebration, and you can see it in the fashion.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.

The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.

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