Modern Art Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old modern art quotes, modern art sayings, and modern art proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. G.K.Chesterton
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 Boudelaire
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
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before. Edith Wharton
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
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. John Ciardi
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 best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality Oscar Wilde
The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order. Robert Motherwell
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty Piet Mondrian
The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces 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
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with Golda Meir
In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period. Edward Hopper
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
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
Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art. Max Bill
Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image. Christopher Lasch
You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. Milan Kundera
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
As the spiral of modern art history continues to wind down, we can see the increasing demand for tradition in the visual arts Igor Babailov