Modernism - Critical Texts Flashcards
Henry Moore on Brancusi - ‘The sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence’ ‘It has been Brancusi’s special mission’
Quoted in Herbert Read’s ‘Concise History of Modern Sculpture’ 1964
Importance of the truth to materials aspect and the process of the sculpting for Brancusi.
Alexandra Parigoris on Brancusi - ‘By eliminating evidence of the sculptors’s touch, Brancusi invited the viewer to experience the finished product, not to imagine its making’
‘The Road to Damascus’ 2004
It is not about the process it is about the finished product. Counter-modernist. Not just completely abstract shapes- still representational and comes back to a subject.
Brancusi on himself
‘In the end, direct or indirect, cutting means nothing, it is the complete thing that counts’
‘What is real is not the exterior form but the idea, the essence of things’
‘I want just the flash of its spirit’
‘The love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness’
‘The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed’
‘We will glorify war- the world’s only hygiene’
‘We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice’
‘We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot’
Futurist Manifesto, written by Marinetti for Le Figaro, 1909
“A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even before he recognises the subject matter”
Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908
Art “devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter… a soothing, calming influence on the mind… like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue”
Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908
“His studio was a world within a world… nowhere in Matisse’s work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 1980
‘The statement, ‘This is what I see’ becomes replaced by a question: “Is this what I see?” Relativity is all’
Robert Hughes, Shock of the New, 1991 (in Cezanne’s work)
‘How could you make paintings that might reflect the immense shifts in consciousness that this altering technological landscape implied?’
‘A parallel dynamism to the machine age’
Robert Hughes, Shock of the New, 1991 (cubism as a response to technologic changes inspiring new ways of seeing)
