My work as a painter has always been tied to Modernism. I read everything I could find related to art, from Cézanne through the 1950s.
Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.
Modernism probably wouldn't have happened without lesbians in Paris.
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.
When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.
Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.
Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time.
In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.
I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.
My definition of modernism took a while to develop.
Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.
It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original - for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did.
Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.
Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.
And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.
The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.
The modernist writers found despair inspirational.
You are born modern, you do not become so.
