Max Beckmann Quotes

• Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement… for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

  Max Beckmann

  Topics in Art

• What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

• There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

  Max Beckmann

• Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

• Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

  Max Beckmann

• One of my problems is to find the self.

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

• 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!

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

• I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

  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

• I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

• I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.

  Max Beckmann

• 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.

  Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann (18)

Birth:	12th February, 1884
Death:	28th December, 1950
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Painter, Sculptor, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 2nd November

Births

• 1949 - Lois McMaster Bujold
• 1936 - Rose Bird
• 1977 - Randy Harrison
• 1914 - Ray Walston
• 1877 - Aga Khan III

Deaths

• 1975 - Pier Paolo Pasolini
• 2004 - Theo van Gogh
• 1970 - Richard Cardinal Cushing
• 1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem
• 2000 - Robert Edmond Cormier