[it is] amusing all the same, how the peacetime life we cursed and groaned about now elevates itself with iron logic to the status of paradise.. - Max Beckmann

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.

Today I wanted to die of weakness and melancholy again.

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...