I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness. I haven’t the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to expose the Absolute, and not merely the factitious woman.
—Georges Braque, circa 1908

Subject, with her, is often incidental.
—Wallace Stevens, on the poetry of Marianne Moore, 1935

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.
—Willem de Kooning, 1963

Although we have lately been advised that “the days when one could sit down with an easy mind to write an account of something called modernism are over,”[1]there nonetheless remains very little in our experience of the arts even in this first decade of the twenty-first century that can be separated from the traditions that were established by what used to be called the modern movement but that nowadays tend to be known collectively as modernism. As I shall be using the term here—that is, modernism as a movement in literature as well as the visual arts—it was never monolithic in style, ideas, or impact. It encompassed a broad range of styles, from realism and symbolism to pure abstraction,