Modernism - critics

(by work)

Woman with a hat (Matisse)

an art of “balance, of purity and serenity” (Matisse)

“through [painting], the artist expresses his inner vision” (Matisse)

“exactitude is not truth”(Matisse)

“nastiest smear of paint” (Leo Stein (Gertrude Stein’s - who bought it - sister))

Goldfish (Matisse)

“art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter” (Matisse)

“expresses his inner vision” (Matisse)

“‘Gold-fish’ defines these creatures as ideal inhabitants of an idyllic golden age” (Charlotte Wilkins)

Blue nude (or souvenir of Biskra) (Matisse)

“exactitude is not truth” (Matisse)

“a variation on the classic Venus pose” (Arnason)

“I do not create a woman, I paint a picture”(Matisse)

Clement Greenberg praised the use of the qualities of paint to create “flatness” and “purity”

Aurora (Matisse)

“Animal vigour of his ‘African’ was blatantly sexual” (Prof. Green about Biskra)

“A variation on the classic Venus pose” (Arnason)

“If I met such a woman […] I would run away in terror” (Matisse)

Luxe, Calme et Volupté (Matisse)

“what I dream of is an art of balance, of purity, and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject, matter” (Matisse)

“Arcadian land of sensuality and calm” (Gill Perry)

“modern leisure scene” (Gill Perry comparing it to Seurat Bathers)

“puzzle picture” (David Carrier) (i.e. part reality, part fantasy)

Adam and Eve (Brancusi)

“what is real is not the external form, but the essence of things” (Brancusì)

“a sculptor for whom the carving tradition was still alive, to exploit and develop [Gauguin and Derain’s] discovery” (William Tucker)

The Kiss (Brancusi)

“direct carving was the true road to sculpture” (Brancusì)

“Brought the ‘primitive’ to Paris” (Zucker)

Mlle Pogany (Brancusi)

“what is real is not the external form, but the essence of things” (Brancusì)

“Hard boiled egg on a sugar lump" (Margit Rowell describing public reception)
“Synthesise ‘primitve’ craft and decorative abstraction with a 20th century machine age aesthetic” (Albert Elsen)

Demoiselles D’Avignon (Picasso)

“it is essentially a beginning: the most innovative painting since Giotto” (John Richardson)

“a desperate titanic clash with all of the problems at once” (Kahnweiler)

“allegorical theme of the wages of sin” (Prof. Green on the skull)

“my first exorcism painting” (Picasso)

Still life with Chair Caning (Picasso)

“art is the lie that enables us to see the truth” (Picasso)

“Using a modern technique to represent a modern subject” (Paul Wood)

Portrait of Daniel Kahnweiler (Picasso)

“my role was to fight for the painters of my age” (Kahnweiler)

“art is the lie that enables us to see the truth” (Picasso)

Self Portrait as a Soldier (Kirchner)

“significantly his right - painting - hand” (Shearer West)

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (Hannah Hoch)

“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things, we said we put our works together like fitters” (Höch)

“What is a work of art?” (Tristan Tzara - Dada Manifesto 1918)

Street Enters the House (Boccioni)

“Bergson’s philosophy occupies a central not peripheral place in Boccioni’s thinking” (Petrie)

“The dominating sensation is that which one would experience on opening a window: all life, and the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and the reality of the objects on the outside” (original catalogue entry)

Homage à Bleriot (Delauney)

Bleriot was “the great constructor” (Delauney)
“An avid embrace of the modern” (Tim Benton)

Mother and Child (Modersohn-Becker)

“every half hour a new position, I love doing that” (Modersohn-Becker)

Modersohn-Becker painted at a time when art was an “erotically based assault on the female form” (Whitney Chadwick)

Notre Dame du Raincy (Perret)

“holy chapel of reinforced concrete”

“chapel of the dead”

“Le Raincy wears a mask, a façade that hides the beauty of the vessel” (Le Corbusier - Perret’s old assistant)

“lanterne des morts” (Paul Jamot)

De la Warr Pavilion (Mendelsohn and Chermayeff)

“Fom follows function” (Graham Whitman)

“the wealth of health” (descriptions of the southern coast)

Villa Savoye (Le Corbusier)

“a house is a machine for living in“ (Le Corbusier)

“The house was declared by its owner to be uninhabitable” (Nicole Sully)

Schroder House (Rietveld)

“Our own times demanded their own form” (Rietveld)

“to give a yet uninformed space a certain meaning” (Rietveld)

Woman with her throat cut (Giacometti)

“denied identity other than as an object of desire and abuse” (Penny Huntsman)

“The invitation is still being tense and it has already been taken. Either way, it means danger” (Micheal Brensonjan)

The Persistence of Memory (Dali)

“the creation of a collective myth” (Breton)

“the materialisation of time flexibility” (Dalí)

“Impotent in a post-Einstein world” (Shabi)

“Freud is my father” (Dalí)