Max Beckmann Quotes

29 quotes in 403 categories

• Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
• All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.
• When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.
• I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
• What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.
• 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…
• I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.
• I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
• I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of…
• I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is…
• In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.
• The greatest mystery of all is reality.
• If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.
• My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance…
• My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.
• I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of…
• The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.
• Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.
• Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real…
• Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus…

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