These modern art quotes will inspire you. Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging modern art quotes, modern art sayings, and modern art proverbs.
Best Modern Art Quotes
- “To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.” ~ Piet Mondrian
- “You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.” ~ Jackson Pollock
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“Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” ~ Banksy
- “Art is the triumph over chaos.” ~ John Cheever
- “The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “In general, modern art… has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.” ~ Herbert Read
- “It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.” ~ Tom Stoppard
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“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.” ~ Edith Wharton
- “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.” ~ Salvador Dali
- “The modern artist… is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.” ~ Henri Matisse
- “Modern paintings are like women, you’ll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.” ~ Freddie Mercury
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“The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.” ~ Herbert Read
- “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.” ~ Barnett Newman
- “The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace – never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.” ~ Banksy
- “I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.” ~ Egon Schiele , Modern art quotes about life
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“Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.” ~ Robert Motherwell
- “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” ~ Tom Stoppard
- “Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “Should # graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It’s way more important than that” ~ Banksy
- “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” ~ John Ciardi
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“The painting has a life of its own” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.” ~ Paul Gauguin
- “The two most potent post-war orthodoxies–socialist politics and modernist art–have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.” ~ Roger Scruton
- “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.” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.” ~ Giorgio de Chirico
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“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.” ~ Tom Wolfe
- “What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.” ~ Octavio Paz
- “In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it’s a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.” ~ Antoni Tapies
- “In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.” ~ Theodor Adorno
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“I have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me – art is the way human beings express what we can’t say in words.” ~ Andrea Bocelli
- “All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.” ~ Joyce Cary
- “I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories – and how contradictory they are – rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
- “The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.” ~ Golda Meir
- “When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.” ~ Jackson Pollock
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“Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.” ~ Jackson Pollock’
- “My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements.” ~ Jackson Pollock
- “It is the common defect of modern art study. Too many students do not know why they draw.” ~ Robert Henri
- “To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you’ve had a few minutes to play with them. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” ~ Tom Stoppard
- “The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.” ~ Unknown
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“I’d live in a museum if I could. I used to spend hours and hours in the Museum of Modern Art.” ~ Sylvester Stallone
- “The painters have no copyright on modern art!… I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be – compared to painting – it has different means and aims.” ~ Edward Weston
- “The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish.” ~ Herbert Read
- “Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
- “War is the highest form of modern art.” ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
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“I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.” ~ Jean-Francois Chevrier
- “Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.” ~ Salvador Dali
- “While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.” ~ Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
- “Modern art must strike out from the old. The new is not revealed to those whose eyes are fastened in worship upon the old…Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.” ~ Albert Pinkham Ryder
- “I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers – still at the Picasso stage – are not admitted.” ~ Jean Cocteau , Museum modern art quotes
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“There is, in reality, no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.” ~ Hans Hofmann
- “It was not very easy for a woman to impose herself as a modern artist in Germany… Most of our male colleagues continued for a long time to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status.” ~ Hannah Hoch
- “I am perfectly convinced that whatever the gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear they are not that sort of thing….Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has based any doctrine on it. And the act of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is purely a modern art.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Museum of Modern Art doesn’t have anything to do with what I do. Probably has made some differences in my sales, I wouldn’t be surprised. Again, you have to ask other people, because I don’t have a measuring device.” ~ Garry Winogrand
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“Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.” ~ Dave Barry
- “Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world.” ~ Hans Rookmaaker
- “Do you realize that people don’t know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories – and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “I love art, I collect mostly modern art.” ~ Alan Patricof
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“I love to collect modern art.” ~ Maria Sharapova
- “In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical – in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan – paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it.” ~ Antoni Tapies
- “Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don’t think there’s anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn’t unusual – the Orientals did that.” ~ Jackson Pollock
