Beckmann Max Quotes

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. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality. Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained. Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. One of my problems is to find the self. I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life. Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space. Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life. The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves. We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression, the infinite seas, the wild rocks, the melancholy language of the black trees in the snow, the wild strength of spring flowers and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer day when Pan, our old friend, sleeps and the ghosts of midday whisper. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form. Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome. The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut. I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones. What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality. What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible. The greatest mystery of all is reality. In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers. 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. I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery. What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence. When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting. All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. It was so wonderful outside that even the wild senselessness of this enormous death, whose music I hear again and again, could not disturb me from my great enjoyment! Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.