Max Ernst Quotes

#1. The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

Max Ernst

#2. Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

Max Ernst

#3. Art has got nothing to do with taste.

Max Ernst

#4. Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.

Max Ernst

#5. The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility.

Max Ernst

#6. And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us ...

Max Ernst

#7. My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

Max Ernst

#8. Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness.

Max Ernst

#9. Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.

Max Ernst

#10. The role of the painter ... is to project that which sees itself in him.

Max Ernst

#11. I have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the painting itself that should be beautiful.

Max Ernst

#12. I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works.

Max Ernst

#13. When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.

Max Ernst

#14. Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

Max Ernst

#15. A series of powers are at work within the great stream of Expressionism who have no outward similarity to one another but a common direction of thrust, namely the intention to give expression to things of the psyche [Seelisches] through form alone.

Max Ernst

#16. Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Max Ernst

#17. All good ideas arrive by chance.

Max Ernst

#18. Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back.

Max Ernst

#19. Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.

Max Ernst

#20. Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.

Max Ernst