Max Beckmann Quotes

The trenches wound in meandering lines and white faces peered from dark dugouts – a lot of men were still preparing the positions, and everywhere among them there were graves. Where they sat, beside their dugouts, even between the sandbags, crosses stuck out. Corpses jammed in among them. It sounds like fiction – one man was frying potatoes on a grave next to his dugout. The existence of life here had already become a paradoxical joke.

..[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.

What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, 'If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible'.

Very worried and nerveux for 1944. Life is dark – as is death. Close 1943.

I have such a passion for painting! I am continually working at form. In actual drawing and in my head, and during my sleep. Sometimes I think I shall go mad, this painful, sensual pleasures tires and torments me so much. Everything else vanishes, time and space, and I think of nothing but how to paint the head of the resurrected Christ.. .Or how shall I paint Minkchen [his wife Minna] now, with her knees drawn up and her head leaning on her hand against the yellow wall with her rose, or the sparkling light in the dazzling whiteness of the anti-aircraft shell-bursts in the leaden, sun drenched sky...

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.

One thing is sure – we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas.. .To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.

The Ego is the great veiled mystery of the world.. .I believe in it and in its eternal, immutable form. Its path is, in some strange and peculiar manner, our path. And for this reason I am immersed in the phenomenon of the Individual, the so-called whole Individual, and I try in every way to explain and present it. What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.

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.

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!

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception' painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

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.

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.

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..

Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, [Beckmann lived and worked in the heart of Amsterdam during World War 2.] an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.