Top 29 Max Beckmann Quotes
#1. Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.
Max Beckmann
#2. I am working here (in 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
#3. 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
#4. 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 now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers.
Max Beckmann
#5. 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
#6. 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 to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.
Max Beckmann
#7. Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.
Max Beckmann
#8. 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
#9. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
Max Beckmann
#10. 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 space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.
Max Beckmann
#11. On my left the shooting had the sharp explosion of the infantry artillery, on my right could be heard the sporadic cannon shots thundering from the front, and up above the sky was clear and the sun bright.
Max Beckmann
#12. 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
#13. Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.
Max Beckmann
#14. I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
Max Beckmann
#15. I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.
Max Beckmann
#16. What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.
Max Beckmann
#18. The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings. (in discussion with Franz Marc who demanded in 'Der Blaue Reiter' around 1912 a new art, in relation to its own - changing - time).
Max Beckmann
#19. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.
Max Beckmann
#20. 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 painting.
Max Beckmann
#21. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
Max Beckmann
#22. What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.
Max Beckmann
#23. I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.
Max Beckmann
#24. What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.
Max Beckmann
#25. 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
#27. The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves.
Max Beckmann
#28. 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 to protect myself from the infinity of space.
Max Beckmann
#29. 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 marvellous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and - to perfect it.
Max Beckmann
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