David Baker Quotes

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

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

I live in the Dark Ages, the 17th century. Actually, I would have loved to be in Paris in the early 20th century when the Ballets Russes were there and Chanel was designing.

I discovered 'Rite of Spring' when I was 21. As a matter of fact, not with orchestra first, because it was still a work which was not often performed. Don't forget that I was 19 in 1944, still the Occupation time. So it was performed slightly after the end of the war, in 1945.

'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.

On my mental iPod, I always have Stravinsky and Ravel.

Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

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.

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

I hate artists who are not of their time.

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

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

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.

When artists who are not associated with the typical infrastructure get recognition, that becomes a cultural movement.

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.

There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of 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.

I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully.

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.

'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.

I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.