Home › Authors › Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann Quotes
1884–1950 Germany
Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950) was a German painter and print-maker. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement.
Random Max Beckmann quote
23 quotes
Today I wanted to die of weakness and melancholy again.
Space and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.
On my Painting (1938)
Afternoon with Q. [Quappi, his second wife] on foot, looking for butter and coals – in vain.
I want to stay here [Amsterdam] for now, then maybe move on to Paris later on. For the interim, Amsterdam is not bad.
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.
To me the most important thing [in a picture] is roundness captured in height and breadth. Roundness in the plane, depth in the feeling of the plane.
Very worried and nerveux for 1944. Life is dark – as is death. Close 1943.
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.
The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings. [arguing with Franz Marc who demanded in 'Der Blaue Reiter' circa 1912 a new modern art, in relation to its own - changing - time].
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!
It is not the subject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting. Therefore 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.
On my Painting (1938)
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.
Put the picture away or, preferably, send it back to me, dear Valentin. If people cannot understand it is based on their inner engagement with these matters, then there is no point in showing the thing at all.
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..
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.
..[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.
'Departure' [also the title of a famous triptych painting of Max Beckmann], yes departure from the illusion of life toward the essential things that wait behind appearance.. .We must insist that Departure is not bound to a political trend, but is symbolic for all times.
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.
We're continually poring over plans, and the decision is difficult, but it's definitely coming soon. The idea with Barr is not bad and might convince me to take your advice, if B. really does get involved.
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.
On my Painting (1938)
Topics Max Beckmann is quoted on
Works