Max Beckmann > Quotes

“Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.”
― Max Beckmann

“Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul. It is this genuine, eternally unchanging center of strength which makes mind and senses capable of expressing personal things. It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space.”
― Max Beckmann, Max Beckmann: On My Painting

“Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.”
― Max Beckmann, Max Beckmann: On My Painting

“En dan de zee, mijn oude vriendin, al te lang was ik niet bij jou.”
― Max Beckmann

“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.”
― Max Beckmann, On My Painting