Max Beckmann Quotes

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

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

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.

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

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

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

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.

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

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.

The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.

The greatest mystery of all is reality.

What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.

I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.

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.

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.

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!

Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.

I am working here (in Amsterdam) on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!

If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.

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

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

One of my problems is to find the self.

The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings.

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

In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.

All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.

When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.

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.