Max Beckmann Quotes
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Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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..war in itself is one of the manifestations of life, like disease, love, and lust. And just as I follow fear, disease, lust, love, and hate to their utmost limits, well, now I am trying war. It is all life, wonderfully various and rich in inspiration.
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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.
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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.
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it is amusing all the same, how the peacetime life we cursed and groaned about now elevates itself with iron logic to the status of paradise..
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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.
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Oh I wish that I could paint again. Paint is an instrument without which I cannot survive for any length of time. Whenever I even think of gray, green and white, I am overcome with quivers of lust. Then I wish that this war would end and that I might paint again.
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Today I wanted to die of weakness and melancholy again.
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Even our own cadaver-bones shall not hinder us from standing our ground until the very last, proud and tired in the face of the black wall that surrounds us.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
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I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.
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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.
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Very worried and nerveux for 1944. Life is dark – as is death. Close 1943.
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Saw the English pilots coming from the sea in huge bands like the bristling hair of Zeus Jupiter. Heard all destroyed in Frankfurt. Sad... (12 April 1944)
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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.
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I want to stay here Amsterdam for now, then maybe move on to Paris later on. For the interim, Amsterdam is not bad.