Modern Artist Quotes

#1. The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

Jackson Pollock

#2. 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

#3. Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

Salvador Dali

#4. The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

Ezra Pound

#5. The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.

Herbert Read

#6. The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.

Harold Rosenberg

#7. Style is the most valuable asset of the modern artist. That's probably why so many styles are reported lost or stolen each year.

Brad Holland

#8. The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

Piet Mondrian

#9. The modern artist ... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

Jackson Pollock

#10. And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.

Willem De Kooning

#11. The whole thrust of modern art, as far as I understand it, is expanding the role of the artist as a kind of esthetician, someone who actually spends his time, is trained in a way to deal with qualities.

Robert Irwin

#12. In the case of an artistic practice that performs female narcissism..., the threat lies in its making superfluous the arbiters of artistic value. Already presuming her desirability, [she] obviates the modern critical system; loving herself, she needs no confirmation of her artistic 'value

Amelia Jones

#13. Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors?
Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).

Franz Grillparzer

#14. 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

#15. You're very good. Are you a professional artist?"
"I dabble," she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.

Neil Gaiman

#16. Some of modern engineering is necessary to good art. But I think of myself is a cultural artist.

Larry Wall

#17. Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation - and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern

Susan Sontag

#18. As a man I am not a killer. I'm an artist and a modern person. I'll choose sanity.

Frank Ocean

#19. The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#20. Whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

Rebecca West

#21. Appreciation is the breath of life to the creative artist, and in spite of modern conditions, there is enough abroad to sustain him. But his name is now legion; he competes with the dead as well as the living; and the rewards and honours seem attenuated by division.

Walter J. Phillips

#22. Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

Jerry Saltz

#23. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

Joni Mitchell

#24. If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

Andre Malraux

#25. Anybody who loves country music loves gospel. Even they are competing with the same type of problem that I'm competing with. We older artists are competing with the new style of country, with their new modern style of gospel, with the young people.

George Jones

#26. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist

Fernand Leger

#27. The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.

Tom Wolfe

#28. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce
render emotional
his audience, each time.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#29. Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.

Ernst Haas

#30. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#31. I suppose I see myself as a modern soul artist.

Lianne La Havas

#32. The workman in the true sense of the word - the artist in guns - is either extinct, or hidden in an obscure corner. There is no individuality about modern guns. One is exactly like another.

Richard Jefferies

#33. That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.

Francis Ford Coppola

#34. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.

Oscar Wilde

#35. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer.

Susan Sontag

#36. I do believe that it takes a strong dose of alienation to make a good artist or writer in the modern world. You can't be too well-adjusted and still have anything interesting to say.

Howard Sounes

#37. Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

John Walford

#38. Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

Charles Baudelaire

#39. The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second - comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.

Andy Warhol

#40. As an artist and a songwriter myself, I like to feel connected to modern culture and watch how sounds change.

John Feldmann

#41. To a large degree, we are still bound to the modern scientific spirit, that characterizes reality merely by its material and mechanic aspects, without including life, consciousness and the intimate communion with that which poets, musicians and artists bring us in their magnificent works.

Leonardo Boff

#42. Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called artist's world.

Muse

#43. I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.

Sean William Scott

#44. 'Modern Love' completes the EP as an intricate musical piece weaving in and out of complex rhythms. There is even a beatless ambient mix that shows Subb-an has more strings to his bow. We are always keen to push artists out of their comfort zone and really show the world what they are capable of.

Subb-an

#45. On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii ... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#46. When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.

Joaquin Sorolla

#47. In modern times we are often encouraged to protect our ego-force and individuality by securing a private world in which to develop our unique artistic voice. Many artists find themselves solo-paddling along a private and unchallenging river ... Could rivalry be a productive system?

Sara Genn