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THE BATTLE FOR MODeRN 1923

essay-1

Les Artistes

Nobody normal ever accomplished anything great. bwargh von modnar
Muses of Flomm hand

Ideas can come from anywhere.
For FLomm we looked to the past – the work, theories
and counter-the­o­ries of the Ear­ly Moderns.
Con­tem­po­raries brought us the rest of the way.

THESE ARE THE MUS­ES OF FLOMM.

Anni Albers
Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: The dictation of the materials. 1899–1994


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Josef Albers
One line plus one line results in many meanings. 1888–1976

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Yuri Annenkov
His sense of time is developed to the hundredth of a second. 1889–1974

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Guillaume Apollinaire
Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception. 1880–1918

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Hans Arp
DADAism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled ‘Laocoon and Sons’ to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake. 1886–1966

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Eugène Atget
A good photograph is like a good hound dog; dumb but eloquent. 1857–1927

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Johannes Baader
At the inception of the German republic, Baader appointed himself, without undue modesty, president of the Republic of Germany. Even this did not satisfy him and he laid claim to the presidency of the Globe. 1875–1955

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Hugo Ball
We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin. 1886–1927

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Giacomo Balla
Balla introduced graffiti into art. One of his earliest masterpieces is ‘Bankruptcy,’ a closed business building scribbled all-over ... Balla’s art is inspired by movement and speed. 1871–1958

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Marian Bantjes
Inspiration is cross-pollinating. 1963–

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Willi Baumeister
The painter cannot produce real movement on his painting surface. But he can provide a feeling for movement. This apparent movement is a feature expressed in nearly all of modern art. 1889–1955

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Herbert Bayer
Why do we write and print with two different alphabets simultaneously? We do not speak a capital ‘A’ and a small ‘a.’ 1900–85

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Max Beckmann
I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting. 1884–1950

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The Beggarstaffs
The Beggarstaffs’ unusual but compelling images were praised by artists and designers ... Unfortunately, the esteem in which they were held by their peers was matched by the rejection they experienced from potential clients. 1894–99

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Morris Fuller Benton
Morris was reticent, not eager to be noticed or praised, and even proved to be a difficult subject for the Inland Printer reporter once sent to interview him. 1872–1948

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Lucian Bernhard
You see with your eyes, not your brain. 1883–1972

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Umberto Boccioni
Futurists have abolished quietness and statism and have demonstrated movement, dynamism ... Gesture will not any more be a fixed movement of universal dynamism: It will decidedly be the dynamic sensation eternalised as such. 1882–1916

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Anthony Bourdain
Recognize excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Odd balls should be cherished if they can do something that other people can’t do. But also everybody needs to understand that there are certain absolutes, there is a certain line. 1956–2018

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Margaret Bourke-White
Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand. 1904–1971

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David Bowie
Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture that they were brought up in. People have attention spans of 5 seconds and as much depth as a glass of water. 1947–2016

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Russell Brand
We no longer have the luxury of tradition. But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think. 1975–

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Marianne Brandt
Marianne Brandt’s sacrosanct and irreproducible concepts emphasize the clear focus on functionality and have become legendary. 1893–1983

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Georges Braque
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence. 1882–1963

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Brassaï
I don’t invent anything. I imagine everything ... Most of the time, I have drawn my images from the daily life around me. 1899–1984

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Andre Bréton
The work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future. 1896–1966

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Ben Burtt
One interesting thing about the style of sound in the serials of the day [1930s] was they had to come up with an original concept of what a spaceship would sound like ... and those sounds became the basis for all subsequent science-fiction films. 1948–

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Leslie Cabarga
If you are self motivated – like I was at 12 when I spent a summer copying lettering I liked out of Life magazines – you don’t need a nudge to get going. 1954–

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George Carlin
I love individuals. Every person you look at you can see the universe in their eyes if you’re really looking. 1937–2008

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Carlo Carrà
We stand for a use of colour free from the imitation of objects and things as coloured objects. We stand for an aerial vision in which the material of colour is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create. 1881–1966

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Luisa Casati
She was the most flamboyant and dramatic character to flit through the early 20th century European beau monde … Richer than God, gloriously semi-sane, with outrageous tastes in friends, art, decor, clothes, houses, pets and lovers. 1881–1957

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A.M. Cassandre
Cassandre, from 1923 to 1939, was a bridge between the modern fine arts and their contemporary application. 1901–1968

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Paul Cézanne
Style is not created through servile imitation of the masters; it proceeds from the artist's own particular way of feeling and expressing himself. 1839–1906

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Art Chantry
The big problem is most contemporary design practiced today is not really graphic design, but graphic decoration. 1954–

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Charles S. Anderson Design Co.
Our design is based on our impressions of the world around us – pieces of culture; sometimes popular, sometimes obscure. 1989–

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Paul Citroen
The theme of the great city became a veritable obsession for the artist and underwent its most magnificent variations in the Metropolis pictures of 1923 ... What is astonishing in these compositions it that the innumerable fragments of which they are composed truly coalesce into a completely defined and yet unreal unity. 1896–1983

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Oswald Cooper
There was never a great imitator – not even in vaudeville. The way to become a master is cultivating your own talent. 1879–1940

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Salvador Dalí
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: Rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them. 1904–89

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Barbara DeGenevieve
You can assume all photo and video is constructed as a fiction controlled by the person holding the camera and the person who is editing. 1947–2014

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Robert Delaunay
Simultaneousness of colour, simultaneous contrasts and all uneven measures issuing out of colour, conform to their expression in their representative movement: This is the only reality to construct a picture. 1885–1941

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Sonia Delaunay
For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called ‘decorative’ work. I never considered the ‘minor arts’ to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art. 1885–1979

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Fortunato Depero
When I live with what I thought yesterday, I begin to be afraid of those who copy me. 1892–1960

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André Derain
The substance of painting is light. 1880–1954

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Sergei Diaghilev
Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality. 1872–1929

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Otto Dix
If I can't be famous, I want at least to be infamous. 1891–1969

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Théo van Doesburg
True artistic experience is never passive, for the spectator is obliged to participate, as it were, in the continuous or discontinuous variations of proportions, positions, lines and planes. 1883–1931

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Kees van Dongen
The secret of my success? You just paint women smaller and their jewellery bigger. 1877–1968

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Michael Doret
I realized that my work only looks the way it does because as a kid I was constantly exposed to – and often surrounded by – an incredible visual cornucopia.

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Ernst Dryden
I was lucky enough to buy a few of his pieces, not that I needed them to remind me of Dryden – whoever could forget him? 1887–1938

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Marcel Duchamp
Not everyone is an artist but everyone is a fucking critic. 1887–1968

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Raoul Dufy
I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives. 1877–1953

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William Addison Dwiggins
I am a happy invalid and it has revolutionized my whole attack … I will produce art on paper and wood after my own heart with no heed to any market. Revolution, stark and brutal. 1880–1956

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Viking Eggeling
In Diagonal Symphony, the emphasis is on objectively analyzed movement rather than expressiveness on the surface patterning of lines into clearly defined movements, controlled by a mechanical, almost metronomic tempo. 1880–1925

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Aleksandra Ekster
As so often in the history of the modern movement in Russia it was in the theatre that Russian Futurism met with its most complete expression. Aleksandra Ekster’s work was the pioneer force in this field ... Alexander Tairov and Ekster worked out a system of ‘Synthetic Theatre’ in which the set, costume, actor and gesture were to be integrated to form a dynamic whole. 1882–1949

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Hans Rudi Erdt
Much of Erdt’s work showed how simple designs didn’t always have to rely on a more or less realistically depicted object. 1883–1918

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Max Ernst
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted. 1891–1976

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Lyonel Feininger
Feininger himself later said that his ‘mission at the Bauhaus’ was ‘to create atmosphere.’ 1871–1956

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Louise Fili
On a good day, I’m 90% satisfied, which is fine; I don’t think one should ever be 100% satisfied because then there is nothing left to aspire to. 1951–

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Pink Floyd
Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky? 1965–2014

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Sigmund Freud
The man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization. 1856–1939

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Karl Freund
The giant machines of Metropolis really exploded, and a real fire was lighted under the witch Maria, to say nothing of the hundred scenes which were shot naturally without any tricks. 1890–1969

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Stephen Fry
Having a great intellect is no path to being happy. 1957–

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Naum Gabo
What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts. 1890–1977

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Abel Gance
Cinema endows man with a new sense. It is the music of light. He listens with his eyes. 1889–1981

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Paul Gauguin
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. 1848–1903

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Terry Gilliam
We live in a world now where everybody is so terrified of offending or being offended. Skin is so thin now there’s hardly any skin left. 1940–

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Albert Gleizes
Significantly, the only Cubist works by a French painter exhibited before 1914 in Italy was a small group by Gleizes at the Fine Arts Society in Florence in April 1913. By this time the Futurists were claiming to have had their original ideas plagiarized by the French, and in particular by [Robert] Delaunay. 1881–1953

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Natalia Goncharova
One can distinguish two streams in Goncharvoa’s work: Her vigorous and independent research in reviving national traditions, and her more timid and academic interpretations of the current European styles. 1881–1962

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Frederic W. Goudy
I consider a type good when it can’t be any gooder. 1865–1947

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Juan Gris
You are lost the moment you know what the result will be. 1887–1927

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Walter Gropius
You can’t understand a machine until you’ve understood the tools of your craft. 1893–1969

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George Grosz
I drew and painted by opposition and by my work tried to convince this world that it is ugly, ill and hypocrite. 1893–1959

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Raoul Hausmann
It was like a thunderbolt: One could ... instantaneously make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs ... I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema. 1886–1971

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John Heartfield
There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspapers … I found out how you can fool people with photos, really fool them. 1891–1968

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Emmy Hennings
And nighttime when there is no light and pictures fall right off the walls, then someone laughs so big and bright
Someone’s long hands grab for me
And then a lady with green hair who looks at me so very sad – she was once a mother she swears. 1885–1948

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Bill Hicks
I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. I don’t like anything in the mainstream and they don’t like me. 1961–94

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Jessica Hische
The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life. 1984–

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Hannah Höch
I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve. 1889–1978

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Ludwig Hohlwein
Munich produced Ludwig Holhwein and ‘The Six,’ a highly successful confederation of Munich’s other leading Gebrauchsgraphikers ... Huge quantities of advertising for film, theater, cabaret, and art exhibitions emanated. 1874–1949

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Richard Huelsenbeck
DADA means nothing. We want to change the world with nothing. 1892–1974

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Robert Hughes
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. 1938–2012

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Vilmos Huszár
The logo Huszár designed for the cover of De Stijl may have been abstracted from an image of an embracing couple. The four almost identical horizontal bands can be read as representing hands, and the stepped forms the hair of the lovers. 1884–1960

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Johannes Itten
The objective laws of form and colour help to strengthen a person’s powers and to expand his creative gift. 1888–1967

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Eddie Izzard
I use a Bruce Lee technique: ‘The way of no way.’ He had the idea that he would learn everything, so that whoever he had to fight, he could improvise anything. 1962–

hand                                              

Alexej von Jawlensky
I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul ... songs without words. 1864–1941

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Wassily Kandinsky
Everything starts from a dot. 1866–1944

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E. McKnight Kauffer
Kauffer’s 1918 Daily Herald poster ... showed how the idiom of cubism and futurism could make a strong communications impact in graphic design. 1890–1954

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André Kertész
I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life. 1894–1985

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Ludwig Ernst Kirchner
All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds. 1880–1938

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Paul Klee
A line is a dot that went for a walk. 1879–1940

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Ivan Kliun
Seven different-colored geometric shapes, each on a white ground, by Russian Ivan Kliun radiate calibration and nuanced surface. 1873–1943

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Rudolf Koch
People always think I am looking for a personal style but this is not true; I avoid it whenever I can but not with any success. 1876–1934

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Oskar Kokoschka
I consider myself responsible to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life. 1886–1980

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Franz Kupka
Once you realize that it is impossible to capture the character of the various manifestations of nature by pictorial means, and that an interpretation based on imagination is equally erroneous, you will not find yourself facing a gaping void as you might have feared. 1871–1957

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Fritz Lang
I will never forget it – [Josef] Goebbels was a very clever man, he was indescribably charming when I entered the room ... he told me ... the ‘Fuhrer’ had seen Metropolis (1926) and another film that I had made – Die Niebelungen (1924) – and the ‘Fuhrer’ had said ‘this is the man who will give us THE Nazi film.’ I was perspiring very much ... my only thought was ‘how do I get out of here!’ 1890–1976

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Henri Le Fauconnier
At the Indépendants of 1911, Le Fauconnier’s Abundance (1910–11) ... used the allegory of fruitfulness to represent life as a process of incessant birth and rebirth ... with the past flowing into the present and the present merging into the future. 1881–1946

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Bart van der Leck
[Van der Leck] developed a method of abstraction where he progressively covered over a figure study with white paint until it was reduced to a geometric pattern of rectangular elements ... Van Doesburg clearly thought Van der Leck’s [1917 No. 5] composition highly successful. Mondrian disagreed, complaining that one could ‘still see the donkeys.’ 1876–1958

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Fernand Léger
Man needs colour to live; it's just as necessary an element as fire and water. 1881–1955

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Tamara de Lempicka
I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe. 1898–1980

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Wyndham Lewis
I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo. 1892–1957

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J.C. Leyendecker
Distaining reference photography, J.C. Leyendecker worked exclusively from live models. He sketched on canvas in oil paint, doing numerous studies for each finished illustration ... After his death, Charles Beach [his model/ manager/ partner] cut up the canvases and sold the images for a few dollars each. 1874–1951

hand                                        

El Lissitzky
All are creators and there is no reason of any sort for this division into ‘artist’ and ‘nonartist.’ 1890–1941

hand                                              

Mina Loy
The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears – and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. 1882–1966

hand                                              

Ellen Lupton
Design is social. It lives in society, it creates society, and it needs a society of its own. Read, write, and talk about design whenever you can. 1963–

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August Macke
I am interested in the creation of space through colour contrasts rather than through simple shading of light and dark. 1887–1914

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René Magritte
If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. 1898–1967

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Kazimir Malevich
Midnight of art is ringing. Fine art is banished. The artist-idol is a prejudice of the past. Suprematism presses the entire painture into a black square on a white canvas. 1879–1935

hand                                              

Franz Marc
The day is not far distant on which Europeans – the few Europeans who will still remain – will suddenly become painfully aware of their lack of formal concepts. 1880–1916

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F.T. Marinetti
[Futurist] Marinetti proposed ... a language of aggression, a punch in the face ... the ravings of a restless insomniac. 1876–1944

hand                                              

Merrill Markoe
I’m not into bullshit clichés like dying. 1948–

hand                                                    

Steve Martin
Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent. 1945–

hand                                              

Henri Matisse
An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc. 1869–1954

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Alexander McQueen
It’s a new era in fashion – there are no rules. It’s all about the individual and personal style, wearing high-end, low-end, classic labels, and up-and-coming designers all together. 1969–2010

hand                                              

Steven Meisel
Inspiration comes from all over the place … it can be from the nineteenth century as long as it’s new to me. 1954–

hand                                              

Georges Méliès
It is the trick, used in the most intelligent manner, that allows the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible to be rendered visually and produces truly artistic tableaux that provide a veritable pleasure for those who understand that all branches of art contribute to their realization. 1861–1938

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Jean Metzinger
Cubist painting ... needed a dimension greater than the Third to express a synthesis of views and feelings toward the object. This is possible only in a ‘poetic’ dimension in which all the traditional dimensions are superseded. 1883–1931

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Menno Meyjes
Because Menno Meyjes’s film Max presents a humanized portrait of the young Adolf Hitler as a desperately ambitious young painter, it has been prejudged in some quarters as an inappropriately sympathetic apologia for one of history’s monsters ... [though] it presents a fascinating and psychologically credible interpretation of events that may have been crucial to that monster’s formation. 1954–

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Lee Miller
I took some pictures of the place [Hitler’s apartment] and I also got a good night’s sleep in Hitler’s bed. I even washed the dirt of Dachau in his tub. 1907–77

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Joan Miró
The simplest things give me ideas. 1893–1983

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Modern Dog
We sell a tangible commentary on society. We leverage people’s obsessions and pre-existing sentiments, giving it our own twist. We don’t ‘discover.’ We mine pre-existing veins of societal riches. 1987–

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Amedeo Modigliani
The function of art is to struggle against obligation. 1884–1920

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László Moholy-Nagy
The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen. 1895–1946

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Piet Mondrian
By the horizontal-vertical division of the rectangle the neo-plastician obtains tranquility, the balance of the duality: Universe and individual. 1872–1944

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Kiki de Montparnasse
[Kiki] certainly dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era. 1901–53

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Giorgio Moroder
Of course, snooty modernist ponces like myself already have a fantasy version of [Fritz Lang’s] Metropolis in our heads ... but Moroder’s splashy MTV makeover is arguably much closer to what Lang’s overstuffed Expressionist epic deserves, with its heavy overtones of cheesy melodrama and totalitarian kitsch. 1940–

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F.W. Murnau
He used to live each part, experiment with every possibility of the plot, draw up a mental picture of the sets, and perfect each detail of the whole with the greatest care, always asking himself what was the best way of presenting it by means of the camera lens. 1888–1931

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King Oliver
Louis [Armstrong] was there, right there, as he always was, right next to Joe. It didn’t work out. You couldn't hear Joe’s playing. So they moved Louis way over in the corner ... that's the only way they could get the balance. Louis was ... at least twelve or fifteen feet from us on the whole session. 1881–1938

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George Orwell
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those that speak it. 1903–1950

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J.J.P. Oud
For it is beyond all doubt that the motor car, machine, etc., correspond more closely to the socio-aesthetic tendencies of our own age and the future than do the contemporary manifestations of architecture. 1890–1963

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Jim Parkinson
I worked for money and for trade. I lettered for beer. I lettered for furniture. I did a logo in exchange for a 1946 Chevy. 1941–

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Max Pechstein
Work! Intoxication! Brain racking! Chewing, eating, gorging, rooting up! Rapturous birth pangs! Jabbing of the brush, preferably right through the canvas, trampling on paint tubes ... 1881–1955

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Irving Penn
I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel. 1917–2009

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Francis Picabia
Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction. 1879–1953

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Pablo Picasso
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. 1881–1973

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Lyubov Popova
Representation of reality – without artistic deformation and transformation – cannot be the subject of painting. 1889–1924

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Enrico Prampolini
The stage is not a photographic enlargement of a rectangle of reality, nor even a relative synthesis of it; It is the replacement of reality with a theoretical and material system of subjective stage design, as distinct from the ostensibly object scenography of today. 1894–1956

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Marcel Proust
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. 1871–1922

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Man Ray
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how,’ while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why.’ Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information. 1890–1976

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Odilon Redon
It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born. 1840–1916

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Gerrit Reitveld
The reality that architecture can create is space. 1888–1964

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Paul Renner
The truly Modern … is only what we hold today to be timelessly perfect. 1878–1956

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Hans Richter
DADA was not an artistic movement in the accepted sense: It was a storm that broke over the world of art as the war did over the nations. 1888–1976

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Aleksandr Rodchenko
We don’t see what we look at. We don’t see extraordinary perspectives, the foreshortenings and positions of objects ... We must revolutionize our visual reasoning. 1891–1956

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David Lee Roth
That’s the trouble with ‘never’ – when was the last time you did something for the first time? 1954–

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Olga Rozanova
Rozanova’s art ran through a whole gamut of styles ... Her textile designs and simple shapes recall Malevich’s abstract geometrical configurations and her planes of overlapping color bring to mind the paintings of Sonia Delaunay. 1886–1918

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Luigi Russolo
Ancient life was all silence. 1883–1947

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Walter Ruttmann
Walter Ruttmann, the other major avant-gardist in Germany up until 1928, had made his first hand-coloured Opus films by using ‘a small structure with turning, horizontal sticks on which plasticine forms were easily charged during the shooting.’ 1887–1941

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Paula Scher
Be culturally literate, because if you don’t have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you’re not going to express anything to anybody else. 1948–

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Egon Schiele
Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal. 1890–1918

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Oskar Schlemmer
If today’s arts love the machine, technology and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times. 1888–1943

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Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
The essence of art can never change. I’m convinced you can’t talk about art. At best, you will have a translation, a poetic paraphrase, and as for that I’ll leave that to the poets. 1884–1976

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Joost Schmidt
Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt were two Bauhaus designers who stopped using the roman letters as a basis for their typographical designs. Instead their language became more futuristic, with focus on the circle and the line. 1893–1948

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Kurt Schwitters
There are no uncoloured objects. 1887–1948

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Zinaida Serebriakova
Her work is instantly recognizable, most especially those self-portraits which show a beautiful, young and self-assured young woman gazing out at the world. 1884–1967

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Georges Seurat
Some say they see Poetry in my paintings; I see only science. 1859–91

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Gino Severini
Art is nothing but humanized science. 1883–1966

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Howard Stern
I don’t like to stereotype but I’m really getting to believe that all Nazis are bad. 1954–

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Gunta Stölzl
The Bauhaus Period was, for all of us, like a chamber of inalienable treasures, especially the Weimar period, where one could devote oneself fully to one’s work without any sort of calculation. 1897–1983

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Igor Stravinsky
I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it. 1882–1971

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Josef Sudek
I believe a lot in instinct. One should never dull it by wanting to know everything. One shouldn’t ask too many questions but do what one does properly, never rush, and never torment oneself. 1896–1976

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Sophie Taeuber-Arp
The hallmark of Miss Taeuber-Arp's art … was an extreme simplicity of design most often achieved through the use of pure geometrical forms. 1889–1943

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Siegbert Tarrasch
Many have become Chess Masters, no one has become the Master of Chess. 1862–1934

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Vladimir Tatlin
In the squares and in the streets we are placing our work convinced that art must not remain a sanctuary for the idle, a consolation for the weary, and a justification for the lazy. 1885–1953

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Karel Teige
Professional art is a fallacy and, to a certain extent, an anomaly. The artistic work cannot be a product for business speculation nor should it be an object of dry, academic speculation. It is fundamentally a gift, or a game without obligations or consequences. 1900–51

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Jan Tschichold
Every piece of typography which originates in a preconceived idea of form, of whatever kind, is wrong. The New Typography is distinguished from the old by the fact that its first objective is to develop its visible form out of the functions of the text. 1902–74

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Tristan Tzara
DADA doubts everything. DADA is an armadillo. Everything is DADA, too. Beware of DADA. Anti-DADAism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is DADA. But the real DADAs are against DADA. 1896–1963

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Vincent van Gogh
One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music. 1853–1890

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Rudy VanderLans
The potential of personal publications lies with individuals who have something unique to say and are willing to go out on a limb and make themselves heard through this medium. 1955–

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Georges Vantongerloo
There is no need to express art in terms of nature. It can perfectly well be expressed in terms of geometry and the exact sciences. 1886–1965

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Dziga Vertov
I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. 1896–1954

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Mikhail Vrubel
More than any other artist Vrubel was the inspiration to the avant-garde in Russia ... He might be termed the Russian Cézanne. 1856–1910

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Hermann Warm
The first thing everyone notices and best remembers about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is the film’s bizarre look. 1889–1976

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H.N. Werkman
Printing offers more possibilities than painting. It enables me to express myself more freely, and also more directly. 1882–1945

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Robert Wiene
I’ve tried to create what I think is the essence of a modern popular opera: A chain of pure psychological moments, bound by just enough dramatic action as it necessary to hold the observer’s attention without distracting the listener too much from the music. 1873–1938

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Oscar Wilde
Be yourself; everyone else is taken. 1854–1900

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Robin WIlliams
On stage you’re free. You can say and do things that if you said and did any place else, you’d be arrested. 1951–2014

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Yes
Second nature comes alive, even if you close your eyes, we exist through this strange device. Moving to the left, moving to the right, Big Generator, moving through the night. 1968–

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Piet Zwart
I made more sketches and then played typographic games … that’s how I came to understand the typographic profession, I didn’t know the terms, I didn’t know the methods, I didn't even know the difference between capitals and lower case letters. 1885–1977

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