Max Beckmann Quotes
Well - not quite yet - green police the Germans still driving around with machine guns, etc. Nevertheless big peace party with warning by Eisenhower. - Walked around in the city Amsterdam, much drunkenness..
Max Beckmann
Quotes to Explore
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
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
Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
Max Beckmann
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
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
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.
Max Beckmann
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..
Max Beckmann
I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
Max Beckmann
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
..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.
Max Beckmann
I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.
Max Beckmann
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
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!
Max Beckmann
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
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
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.
Max Beckmann
I want to stay here Amsterdam for now, then maybe move on to Paris later on. For the interim, Amsterdam is not bad.
Max Beckmann
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.
Max Beckmann
