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Max Ernst Quotes
1891–1976 Germany
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter and sculptor who worked in the styles of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. He frequently wrote about himself in the third person.
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11 quotes
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.
A painter may know what he does not want.
Woman's nakedness is wiser than the teachings of the philosophers. [the title of his essay]
But it is of the past, it seems to me. Perhaps.. .Man and the nightingales were in the most favourable situation for imagining: for them the forest was a perfect dream-conductor..
The mysteries of the forest (1934)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sanctuary
Ecritures (1970)
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..
The mysteries of the forest (1934)
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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