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Max Beckmann quotes
The metaphysics of substance. The strange feeling which comes over us when we sense: this is skin – this is bone – all in a single vision that is completely unearthly. The dreaminess of our existence mixed at the same time with the indescribably sweet illusion of reality.
Max Beckmann
It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.
Max Beckmann
Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it.
Max Beckmann
As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception' painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.
Max Beckmann
Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.
Max Beckmann
I am working here [Amsterdam] on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!
Max Beckmann
What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, 'If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.
Max Beckmann
Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions – what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows.
Max Beckmann
The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.
Max Beckmann
One thing is sure – we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas... To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.
Max Beckmann
Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, [Beckmann lived and worked in the heart of Amsterdam during World War 2. ] an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.
Max Beckmann
One of my problems is to find the Ego, which has only one form and is immortal – to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live.
Max Beckmann
My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesque in life. An art that can always be directly present to us when life is at its most real.. [ on the same day he noted:].. Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia England France against Germany. We agreed that it would be no bad thing for our rather demoralized present-day civilization if everyone's instincts and drives were to be harnessed to one cause..
Max Beckmann
And the evening of the big Vanity Fair arrived... Perre Rathbone and innumerable people received me in enormous halls. The reporter shot pictures and Mrs. Beckmann [Quappi, his wife] grinned – - o-la-La.... The whole story is a monumental caprice of my situation in Germany before the Nazi's.
Max Beckmann
If one perceives of it all – the entire War or even life as a whole – as a scene in the theater of 'infinity', many things are much easier to bear.
Max Beckmann
Thick rumors of imminent peace are in the air... Big spectacle with six or seven British tanks. In the afternoon, they played war once more at the Palaisplein [near Dam square in Amsterdam center] and at the Rokin [street where Beckmann lived for 8 years, as 'entartete' German artist under German occupation; The Netherlands was liberated by the Allies, 5 May 1945].
Max Beckmann
The editor of this catalog asked me to make a statement about my work. I don't have much to write: - Be a child of your age. - Be naturalistic against your own ego. - Be matter-of- fact toward your inner visions - My love is dedicated to the four great masters of masculine mysticism: Mäleskirchener ([church-painters / muralists, Grünewald, Breughel [both famous painters in the late Middle Ages, ed. ] and Van Gogh.
Max Beckmann
Is there to be no getting away from this loathsome vegetative physicality?... Utter contempt for the lewd enticements that always lure us back into life's clutches. And when, half-parched, we seek to quench our thirst, the gods laugh us to scorn.
Max Beckmann
Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
Max Beckmann
What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.
Max Beckmann
I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
Max Beckmann
It was so wonderful outside that even the wild senselessness of this enormous death, whose music I hear again and again, could not disturb me from my great enjoyment!
Max Beckmann
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