“Design has to serve a purpose and therefore it is not art.”
— Rosmarie Tissi
“To every age its art, to every art its freedom.”
— Motto of the Vienna Secessionists
“A painter can say all he wants with fruit or flowers or clouds.”
— Édouard Manet
“It is really and essentially a flat plane with colors upon it arranged in a certain order.”
— Henri Matisse
“No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.”
— F.T. Marinetti
“We need to see the world with morning eyes.”
— Alexander Rodchenko
“I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light. Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical.”
— Josef Müller-Brockmann
“The line is the first and last thing, both in painting and in any construction in general. A line is a path of a passage, a movement, a collision, a facet, a bond, a connection, a cut.”
— Alexander Rodchenko
“The distant universe and our immediate world can both be found in paper.”
— Kenya Hara
“Art is the path to being spiritual.”
— Piet Mondrian
“I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”
— William Morris
“One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.”
— Alexander Rodchenko
“Wood is wood, concrete is concrete, stone is stone.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
“The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do.’ The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”
— László Moholy-Nagy
“The turn of a century invites introspection.”
— Philip Meggs
“Technical knowledge is creative freedom.”
— Rob Gappert
“Art into life, art into technology, not towards the old, nor towards the new, but towards the necessary.”
— Vladimir Tatlin
“Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.”
— Piet Mondrian
“Let us try for once not to be right.”
— Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)
“Lettering is drawing, calligraphy is writing.”
— Yves Peters
“The Greeks stabilized the alphabet, the Romans polished it off.”
— Ryan Souder (student, Fall 2019)
“Study the old, but create the new.”
— Varvara Stepanova
“Spaghetti is no food for fighters.”
— F.T. Marinetti
“I hate roller coasters, I love books.”
— Dan Milnor
“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
— William Morris
“Photography has all the rights, and all the merits, necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time.”
— Alexander Rodchenko
“Like all two-dimensional shapes perceived by the eye, letters too are subject to the laws of optics. The decisive element in assessing their formal qualities is thus not any kind of measuring instrument, but the healthy human eye.”
— Jost Hochulli
“Without graphic design, you have no avant-garde.”
— Ellen Lupton
“If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality.”