Classicism Quotes

• A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.

  James Joyce

  Country, Art, Style

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.1542, Delphi Classics

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• Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

  Michael Haneke

  Thinking, Healthy, Return

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. December 30, 2009.

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• Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Sickness

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• Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries - or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me - in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Coffee, Two, House

  Letter to "The Keicomolo" - Kleiner, Cole, and Moe (October 1916), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 27), 1964.

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• I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

  Maurice de Vlaminck

  Eye, World, Habit

  Maurice de Vlaminck (1967). “Dangerous corner”

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• Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

  Edward Abbey

  Art, Expansion, Alternatives

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.32, RosettaBooks

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• In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Lines, Might, Canon

  Thorstein Veblen (1993). “A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism”, p.89, M.E. Sharpe

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• Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

  Camille Paglia

  Egypt, Order, Greek

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight.

  Margaret Atwood

  Weed, Children, Growing Up

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• If a dictator takes up my ideas, the resulting town will survive the political system that commissioned it and stand as a social good. Besides, modernism rather than classicism has dominated the architecture of totalitarian regimes of both the left and right.

  Leon Krier

  Ideas, Political, Towns

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• I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

  Whit Stillman

  Thinking, Austin, Endure

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.

  Oswald Spengler

  Mother, Successful, Thinking

  Oswald Spengler (1991). “The Decline of the West”, p.75, Oxford University Press, USA

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• However much the various phases of the French Revolution may have modelled themselves on Roman history the early phase on Republican virtue, the later on Imperial grandeur the fact remains that classicism depended on a fixed and rational philosophy; whereas the spirit of the Revolution was one of change and of emotion.

  Kenneth Clark

  Philosophy, Phases, May

  Kenneth Clark (1973). “The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art”

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• As I see it, all of them - Tachists, Action Painters, Informel artists, and the rest - are only part of an Informel movement that covers a lot of other things as well. I think there's an Informel element in Beuys, as well; but it all began with Duchamp and chance, or with Mondrian, or with the Impressionists. The Informel is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism - the age of kings, or clearly formed hierarchies.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Kings, Thinking

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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