Lewis Mumford Quotes about Art

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The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Lewis Mumford

Running, Art, Nature

"The Culture of Cities". Book by Lewis Mumford. Introduction, 1938.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Creativity, Cities

"The City in History". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 18, 1961.

The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Becoming, Transformation

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training...

Lewis Mumford

Life, Art, Practice

"The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1951.

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Happy Life, Sight

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Times Like These, Voice

Lewis Mumford (2000). “Art and Technics”, p.21, Columbia University Press

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Opportunity, Machines

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Reality, Decay

Lewis Mumford, Robert Wojtowicz (2008). “Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s”, p.194, Univ of California Press

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

Lewis Mumford

Art, Mean, Order

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

Lewis Mumford

Dream, Art, Expression

"Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972" by Lewis Mumford, (p. 399), 1973.