Andre Breton Quotes

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things.

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

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

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

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

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.

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.

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

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.

Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme.

I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

Judson Church was a very important place because they believed in art. They also took care of drug addicts. Without the Judson, nothing could have happened.