..I want a lovely life; in order for it to be, harmony and style are necessary. I avow mine to the key of aesthetic sentiment – the constant permanent creation everywhere and in every one. All is false there, all is true. The truth is the desire to see falsely. I do not want the naked truth; it is the principle of my life. It is that which makes my life one which is artistic and complete. Feelings, events, people and things, such as they are, are nothing to me. I wish them invented, illusory, false in so far as true life and in so far as art.
Russian-German-Swiss expressionist painter (1860–1938)
Marianne von Werefkin (10 September 1860, Tula, Russia – 6 February 1938, Ascona, Switzerland) was a Russian-German-Swiss Expressionist painter and important contributor in the Munich artist-group Der Blaue Reiter. At the outbreak of the First World War, Werefkin and Jawlensky immigrated to Switzerland; in 1921 they separated. Werefkin stayed in Ascona, on Lago Maggiore where she painted her colorful imaginative landscapes in an expressionist style, till her death.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alternative Names:
Marianna Vladimirovna Werefkin
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Marianne Werefkin
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Marianne Von Werefkin
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Marianna Vladimirovna Werefkina
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Marianna Vladimirovna Verevkina
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Marianne Von Werefkina
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M. v. Werefkin
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Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina
From Wikidata (CC0)
..I need to immerse my gaze in your eyes, it is in their mirror that I see myself as I would like to be, and it is only in seeing myself as I feel I should be. I think, therefore I am, my Beautiful One, to both of us, every day we recreate the world, every day a paradise falls in our hands, to darken in the dust of many paradises.. .The paradises will fall in our hands, will sink in the dust and will be born again according to our will.
All bores me in the world of facts, I see an end, a limit to all things and my heart thirsts for the infinite and for eternity. How to speak of the feeling, so serious, that has seized me?.. .Human activity has its greatest efforts always fall back on broken wings. Oh, thus I close my eyes. I do not wish to see, to hear, to love, or to act. Only artistic creation, infinite, unlimited, work of god in man, appears desirable to me. It only is the truth and only it is the illusion...
Why should we do as those who do not have other joys than to believe, as night falls, in their double beds.. .that it is to be great and sanctified by love to jostle the companions of their bed. Our passion must be like our love – illusory and artistic, having no other end than the desire to be beautiful. To remain beautiful in unsated [unstated?] passion...
Oh, If I had been able to realize you with my hand. If the painted canvas was able to give me your dear image. The labor was you ['The Unknown'] the work of art was me – I have kissed your head, I have looked elsewhere.. .You are neither good, nor charitable. You do not know how to love. – You are only great and beautiful. I sacrificed to tenderness and still, my self, you do not know how to love.
You for whom I have looked so hard without ever finding. You whom I have longed for, called after, without ever seeing you come, you who are always present without ever existing – I am writing to you now. You who are basically only myself, but a much bigger and more noble self, an ingenious self, a self far from me, as real as the whole distance between the dream and the reality.
A colossal orange moon rolls as an unbelievable ball against intense blue. The silhouettes of the houses flank this blue on both sides, forming a childishly rigid little frame. As if we witness the birth of the song of flowers which are subordinated to this blue and dominated by the orange moon. [she wrote in 1905]
In: Lettres à un Inconnu, (Notebook II, p. 8) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 106
A man with taste is the same as a woman with taste. Man invents his home, woman - her dress. Being an artist means having an individual, distinct from all other people's perception and concept of every single thing. Being an artist does not mean possessing a faculty of combining lines and paints, being artful in this or that sort of art, but having a world inside oneself and individual forms to express it.
In: Lettres à un Inconnu, 1902 (Notebook I, p. 234) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 101
in German: Ich bin Frau, bin bar jeder Schöpfung. Ich kann verstehen und kann nichts schaffen.. .Mir fehlen die Worte, um meine Ideal auszudücken. Ich suche den Menschen, den Mann, der diesem Ideal Gestalt geben würde. Als Frau, verlangend nach demjenigen, der ihrer inneren Welt Ausdruck geben sollte, traf ich Jawlensky...
I am a woman, I lack every [ability for] creation. I can understand everything and cannot create.. .I don't have the words to express my ideal. I am looking for the person, the man, who can give this ideal form. As a woman, wanting someone who could give the internal world expression, I met Jawlensky...
I love what doesn't exist. I love love that doesn't exist, which extends above you like an invisible city, like uncapturable smoke, a love that evokes a longing for enchanted lands, which fills the head with magical scenes, which confers strength and grandeur, which leads all beings to perfection, which adorns you in marvelous clothes, which increases painting abilities, which crowns you king of all goals, which makes you a god of creation.