Quotes by Max Beckmann - Page 1

The greatest mystery of all is reality.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Mystery
Reality
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One of my problems is to find the self.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Problem
Self
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There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Appetizers
Hate
I Hate
Sentimentality
Hate Nothing More
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I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Loathe
Slavery
Tears
Sign
Weep
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I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Political
Political Life
Real
Belong
Blindly
Passed
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Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Achievement
Painting
Appeared
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Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Animal
Illness
Overcoming
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I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Believe
Objectivity
Painting
Love Believe I Believe
Forces
Objective
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What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Ideas
Reality
Want
Hides
So-Called
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I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Bridges
Invisible
Reality
Seeking
Visible
Am
Bridge
Through
Which
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What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Real
Secret
What Matters
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If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Invisible
Penetrate
Wish
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The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Art
Law
Moral
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All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Art
Feelings
Inspiration
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Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Space
Deities
Infinite
Again
Contained
Deity
Surrounds
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Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Art
Amusement
Creative
Play
Realization
Sake
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In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Creative
Principles
Strong
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When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Events
Healing
Spiritual
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My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Quality
Figures
Trying
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The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Desire
Records
Stronger
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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 / Writer
Art
Play
Torment
Questions
Persecute
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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 / Writer
Abstract
Enough
Enough Already
Mean
Painting
Real
Unreal
Each
Hardly
Object
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I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Sentimentality
Love Believe I Believe
Forces
Love Hate Believe
Objective
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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 and political life.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Men
Body
Difficult
Painting
Political
Political Life
Real
Whole
Absorb
Life Man Soul
Belong
Blindly
Difficult Thing
Life Man Political
Passed
Thus
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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 / Writer
Enjoyment
Enormous
Wonderful
Wild
Disturb
Whose
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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 / Writer
Lying
Real
Secret
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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 / Writer
Exhilaration
Giving
Lasts
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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 / Writer
Space
Abstract
Depth
Height
Infinity
Protect
Surface
Width
Picture
Phenomena
Plane
Thus
Transfer
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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 / Writer
Men
Animal
Heaven
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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 / Writer
Space
Combination
Division
Lines
Objects
Relation
Thinking
Arm
Breaking
Leg
Straight
Plane
Wonderful Sense
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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 / Writer
Artillery
Clear
Heard
Infantry
Left
Shooting
Sky
Sun
Above
Bright
Cannon
Explosion
Front
Sharp
Thundering
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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 / Writer
Covered
Crosses
Fields
Firing
Flower
Graves
Highways
Lines
People
Shooting
Spring
Avoid
Straight
Wooden
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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 / Writer
Art
Average
Fairy Tale
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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 / Writer
Jobs
Heart
Order
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What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Bridges
Ideas
Reality
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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 / Writer
Feelings
Reality
Sweet
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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 / Writer
Bridges
Identity
Reality
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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 / Writer
Dimensions
Magic
Two
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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 / Writer
Art
Depressing
Luxury
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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 / Writer
Blessed
Eye
Philosophical
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I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture
Max Beckmann / Writer
Degradation
Order
Vision
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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 / Writer
Men
Shadow
Unique
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The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, 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 / Writer
Order
Reality
Suffering
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Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, (Beckmann lived in the center 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 / Writer
Ocean
Space
War
Filled In
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We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression, the infinite seas, the wild rocks, the melancholy language of the black trees in the snow, the wild strength of spring flowers and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer day when Pan, our old friend, sleeps and the ghosts of midday whisper. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form.
Max Beckmann / Writer
Grief
Spring
Summer
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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 / Writer
Beautiful
Expression
Spiritual
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The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs.. .May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work - in spite of everything [a. o. using his bed sheets as canvas for the new paintings].
Max Beckmann / Writer
War
Blood
Boredom
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Max Beckmann Quotes - Page 1

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