Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmannwas a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity, an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth12 February 1884
CityLeipzig, Germany
CountryGermany
along art creative drives eternal journey quest sake self
Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.
summer spring flower
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.
hate i-hate appetizers
There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
order vision degradation
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
spiritual healing events
When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.
tears slavery loathe
I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.
spring flower people
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.
self problem
One of my problems is to find the self.
trying quality fortune
My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.
desire stronger records
The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.
beautiful spiritual expression
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.