Max Ernst Quotes
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The painter
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The 2nd of April (1891) at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years.
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first couplet of Max Ernst's poem 'Etna', in: 'Literature', Paris, October 15, 1923; as quoted in Max Ernst sculpture, Museo d'arte contemporanea, Edizioni Charta, Milano, 1969, p. 15
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A painter may know what he does not want.
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Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
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p. 360
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Looking at them the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico, c. 1919 I had the sense of rediscovering something I had always known, just as when some event already seen opens up to us a whole realm of our own dream world, one that we have failed to see or comprehend, owing to a kind of censorship.
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All good ideas arrive by chance.
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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.
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p. 352
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Eternity
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Etna
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Sanctuary
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Laymanship
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I saw a shady forest and therein a crowd of nightingales. The nightingales as to their breast were rough and hairy, and as to their feet some were like calves, some like panthers, and some like wolves, and they had beast's claws instead of toes.
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Woman's nakedness is wiser than the teachings of the philosophers. the title of his essay
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What is a forest? A marvelous insect. A drawing-board, what do forests do? They never go to bed early. They are waiting for the tailor. What is the high season of the forests? It is the future..
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Studies in painting: Non. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist, and even the expression 'self-taught' is a phony, he thinks.
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p.290
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A painter may know what he doesn't want. But woe be to him if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself.
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Max Ernst died the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time.
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p. 366
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Quote from 'Max Ernst', exhibition catalogue, Galerie Stangl, Munich, 1967, U.S., pp.6-7, as cited in Edward Quinn, Max Ernst. 1984, Poligrafa, Barcelona. p. 12