“Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.”

— Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 250

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Henry Moore 44

English artist 1898–1986

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“There is an intimate relationship between my pictorial [2-dimensional] and my sculptural work. I would never begin on a sculpture without first gaining an idea of the colour... My mind is captivated by this task until I start to put down the colour on paper and imagine that this colour will become a drawing. And then, suddenly, the drawing begins to acquire shape, the shape, and this shape becomes the real shape.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

as quoted in the exhibition text of 'Marino Marini, Painter, Draughtsman, Sculptor', Museum de Fundatie, September 2013 to 16 March 2014

“The composition, harmonies and proportions of those 'intended shapes' is the great and most difficult problem which the modern sculptor attacks, for sculpture is only forms, only spaces embraced by lines which demonstrate them. The secrets of a never dying piece of sculpture is to be had only by undergoing experience.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

n.p.
1960 - 1968, Plastic Language, Ossip Zadkine

“It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.... these new shapes say.... what the symbols said.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s
Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 142
after 1970, posthumous

“The artist's mission is to give shape to what is eternal in nature, to reveal its inherent beauty; he sublimates the shapes of the human body. He shows an enlarged and simplified nature, liberated from all the details, which do not tell us anything. He shows us a work according to the size of his own experience, of his heart and his spirit.”

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) Swiss artist

Quote from a speech of Ferdinand Hodler: 'The artist's mission' (held in Freibourg in 1897), first published in 1923 in Zurich; as cited by Paul Westheim in Confessions of Artists - Letters, Memoirs and Observations of Contemporary Artists, Propyläen Publishing House, Berlin, 1925

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) novelist from Dominica

Source: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.”

Mason Cooley (1927–2002) American academic

City Aphorisms, Third Selection (1986)

“These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...

“The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded - and devoured - by a black flame.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

“It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures…. these new shapes say…. what the symbols said. [Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s]”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 142
after 1970, posthumous

“The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. 1: The Naked and the Nude

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Henry Moore 44

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