Irène Hillel-Erlanger

Pourquois j'écris? ... pas facile à écrire.

Disons (s’il vous plaît) que

j’écris parce que j’adore la parole et aussi parce que

j’aime Paris – et les catalogues des grands magasins

de nouveautés!

(Littérature 11, January 1920, p. 23)

André Breton

"Every time I pass a cloakroom, my mind goes back to the already distant days when I first knew Max Ernst, and the time he told me how sure he was of having once seen the hats and overcoats leave the rack where they were hanging and move away to another rack some distance away, without any apparent human intervention. This event had taken place in Cologne, I believe, and I remember that, in whatever café we were sitting, we made an unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the result. What is far more important, though, than the authenticity of certain phenomena of levitation is that on this occasion Max Ernst testified to the fact that he found it impossible to hang up anything at all in a fixed position, and equally impossible to assume that a figure that he was painting, even supposing that he were to divest himself of it as one divests oneself of one's clothes, would ever remain where he had put it, would not step down from the frame and reassemble the picture as the needs of the drama that we are playing out may demand." 
-"Surrealism and Painting" (Revolution Surréaliste 9-10 (1927))

Ellsworth Kelly

(Anne Weber in a dress designed by Kelly, Sanary, 1952)

Lucia Moholy

i am almost starting to believe that it's not my fault alone that i'm not creating any of my own work. business is simply eating me up. when one spends eight hours in the workshop one no longer has the energy to work seriously in the evening, especially not here, with so many people around, many of them close to me. sometimes i run a pension and sometimes a flourishing nightclub, and i must say this is also fun.

- Gunta Stölzl, Gunta Stölzl: Bauhaus Master, 98

(László Moholy-Nagy, photographed by Lucia Moholy, 1926)

Richard Martin

"Everyone says, 'Why don't you do an art and fashion show?" To my succinct answer, 'never,' some do not hesitate to reply, 'Well, you could do it your way.' I've done it my way: NO WAY. The generalization is inane and not even worth consideration. Do not, under any circumstances, use this book recklessly; do not believe in art and fashion simply on the evidences of some select relationships in one art movement ... If art and fashion are conjoined, it is because of the magnanimity of art, its big spirit for all things created. Cubism was munificent and bountiful, and fashion responded with alacrity ..."

- from Cubism and Fashion, 155.

Walter Benjamin

An image to characterize Baudelaire's way of looking at the world. Let us compare time to a photographer--earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of that essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixir that might act as a developing agent is unknown. And there is Baudelaire: he doesn't possess the vital fluid either--the fluid in which these plates would have to be immersed so as to obtain the true picture. But he, he alone, is able to read the plates, thanks to infinite mental efforts. He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And from this presentiment speaks the negative of essence in all his poems.

-"Baudelaire," The Writer of Modern Life, 27

Lee Miller

Germany is a beautiful landscape dotted with jewel-like villages ... Mothers sew and sweep and bake, and farmers plough and harrow; all just like real people. But they aren't; they are the enemy. This is Germany and it is spring.

-Fashion and Modernity, 45