Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmannwas a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity, an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth12 February 1884
CityLeipzig, Germany
CountryGermany
thinking space legs
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.
space deities infinite
Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.
war ocean space
Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, (Beckmann lived in the center 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.
space three height
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.
believe forces love reason
I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
above cannon clear explosion heard infantry left sharp shooting shots thundering
On my left the shooting had the sharp explosion of the infantry artillery, on my right could be heard the sporadic cannon shots thundering from the front, and up above the sky was clear and the sun bright.
along art creative drives eternal journey quest sake self
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.
men animal heaven
One of my problems is to find the Ego, which has only one form and is immortal - to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live.
blessed philosophical eye
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.
depressing art games
It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.
unique men shadow
Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions - what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows.
beautiful spiritual expression
Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.
desire stronger records
The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.
trying quality fortune
My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.