Marianne von Werefkin: Quotes about life

“I want to work. It is an obsession. I am gnawed at the heart by an excruciating desire to manipulate color... I see figures, with an incredible intensity, pass before my eyes. Let us analyze this – if it is possible to toss it. Why do you no longer work? Why work again? Faith has left me – the habit of putting myself into the background, has done the rest. Am I a true artist? Yes, yes, yes. Am I a woman? Alas. Yes, yes, yes. Are the two [very probably Jawlensky & Marinanne] able to work as a pair? No, no, no. Who will take up the desires -?... The work of my life, this talent [Jawlensky] that I protect with all my interest, with all my affection, it must be alone in the dwelling. Reason says, calm yourself. But the great passion in me, and my call to work, destroys all the calm acquisitions of my life.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Life , Faith , Color , Passion

“I save myself in a church. Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons. One sings everything that one has sung before in the past. Some black figures - and the heart is heavy. The tears take one's breath away and the past rises up again. Home.... in Peter's office [Marianne's brother, governor of Kovno Province, Lithuania], my entire soul starts to ache for him, for that battle for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life. Empty, empty in the house, no one. Whoever comes - doesn't get his fill of him. And then such a heated rush of love rips out of the [visitor's] heart, begging one's pardon and forgetting the trouble behind, that the whole house swells.”

Marianne von Werefkin

1906 - 1911
Source: a letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as quoted in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909

Love , Life , Home , Soul

“I adore my life: it is filled with so much true poetry, fine feelings, things many have no idea about. I despise my life, which, being rich, allowed itself to be crammed into the confines of conventions. Between these two opinions pulsates my soul always longing for beauty and good.”

Marianne von Werefkin

1895 - 1905
Source: Lettres à un Inconnu, 1902 (Notebook I, p. 234) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 101

Life , Beauty , Feeling , Soul

“I love Russia as few people do - I've demonstrated it my whole life, but those who plow here in Russia, are not my brothers. I heed a Russian life with my entire existence, I look into the eyes of all the people around me, nothing... And the main horror is that we long for Russia and here no one loves her, they only mimic those feelings.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Werefkin to Jawlensky, 1909-1910, fond 19-1458, pp. 35–36 as reprinted in Lauchkaite-Surgailene, Lauchkaite-Surgailene, "Marianna Verevkina. Zhizn' v iskusstve," Vilnius, no. 3, sec. 15, 136
1906 - 1911

Love , Life , People , Feeling

“And I go to my room and stretch out my arms to the West—that it is far away [from here], that I will someday return. Outside those painful sensations—it is horrible to be before these people and their lives. Service and family troubles -a hard beginning, pay raise, promotion - sweet dreams, scandal - daily bread, [This is a figurative reference to Our Lord's Prayer, "give us this day our daily bread.."] and their happiness reminds me sweetly, of those who buy "for the people," and whose food you wouldn't put in your mouth. I think of Munich and of my health. All that is here is suffering and this horror of beauty and this horrible life and this overbearing literature, and the complete superfluousness of art.”

Marianne von Werefkin

1906 - 1911
Source: a letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as quoted in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909

Life , Pain , People , Health

“.. I want a lovely life; in order for it to be, harmony and style are necessary. I avow mine to the key of aesthetic sentiment – the constant permanent creation everywhere and in every one. All is false there, all is true. The truth is the desire to see falsely. I do not want the naked truth; it is the principle of my life. It is that which makes my life one which is artistic and complete. Feelings, events, people and things, such as they are, are nothing to me. I wish them invented, illusory, false in so far as true life and in so far as art.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Love , Life , People , Truth

“One life is far too little for all the things I feel within myself, and I invent other lives within and outside myself for them. A whirling crowd of invented beings surrounds me and prevents me from seeing reality. Color bites at my heart.”

Marianne von Werefkin

from her short biography on the website of museum 'Lenbachhause', undated http://www.lenbachhaus.de/collection/the-blue-rider/werefkin/?L=1
1906 - 1911

Life , Color , Feeling , Reality

“Art is not hysteria. Art is as natural to man as is thought, it is a normal function of his brain. Art is observation and consciousness. It is not an instinct, vague, indecisive, sickly. Art is an eternal source – life, and an unlimited expression, the individual. These two elements, well-adapted, make masterpieces... All speech that a human being finds to give a new impression is of art. Why believe that the speech must be epileptic to become art?... Such is art. It is the product of life and the individual. It is born from their clash, from the received impression. But this impression is made once, for then it is no longer, neither life nor the individual..”

Marianne von Werefkin

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Life , Art , Nature , Indecision

“The artist is the only one who detaches himself from life, opposes his personality against it, he is the only one who orders things as he wishes them to be in place of things as they are. Thus for him life is not a fait accompli, it is something to remake, to do again. He takes possession of his gifts in order to continue, to change, He makes his choice, it is he who creates the conceptions of beautiful and ugly, those are the things to preserve, the things to change. At the seat of the things that it is necessary to change he puts his desires, his aspirations, in one word, his personality…”

Marianne von Werefkin

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Life , Beauty , Change , Personality

“Convince yourself. Kovno is a treasure-trove for artists. It is gloomy, the lamps don't make it lighter and the streets are getting darker. Their violet windows hover threateningly in the darkness. The elusive lines of low houses, on them - the glimmer of green and red flames - illuminating rows of shops. Bright green bright red stripes [all] fall on the violet sidewalk. And all those shadows are full of people who only speak about one thing, about love, in the dialect, Polish or broken Russian. Whispers and loud words touch the silence, like the green and red bands of light - the darkness of the night. Something terrible, terrible lies over everything, I feel a shudder, it seems I am in another world, far away from real life.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Quote from Werefkin's letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as cited in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909
1906 - 1911

Love , Life , People , World

“.. Oh my dear friend, you whose voice called me towards my beautiful past, oh how I love you because you are young, you serve the idea, you understand the beauty of a life devoted completely to abstraction. Oh the devil you have done me, and the good of this devil. There is an atrocious page in my existence... I am not a woman. Neither love nor the family satisfies me. I don’t like the baby. I detest the household. I love all works of the human genius, I adore art the beauties of nature and of the heart. The beautiful, the beautiful in all such as love and such as life.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Love , Life , Family , Beauty

“Five years ago I spent two and a half months in Berlin, and every day I visited the museum to have at least a brief look at this divine masterpiece [a portrait of the soldier of fortune, Alessandro del Borro, then attributed to Diego Velazquez, and later to an unknown master], and every day my soul sang in response to it stronger and stronger. I was very sick then, and that genius alone reconciled me to my life when there was so much suffering in it. Looking at his creation, at these lines, at these half-tones (remember that shadowed jaw against the background or the column against the dress), at all this charm of the art, at this grand style, I started to want to live again, to see it again and again, to live on by painting and perhaps by painting alone.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Quote in Werefkin's Letter to Igor Grabar on August 10, 1895; Department of Manuscripts of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Fund 106. Item 3242
1895 - 1905

Life , Art , Soul , Suffering

“.. he [ Jawlensky ] is the creation of my life, my ultimate goal, my torture.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Note in her Journal, c. 1921; as cited in Lettres a un Inconnu, (Notebook III, p. 120) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 107 (notebook II, p.10).
after 1911

Life

“I have lost faith in myself and that is why my life has gone to the devil. Why: I have been strict with myself. I love art with a passion so selfless that when I believed that I saw that I would be able to serve it better by abstaining myself, so that another [Jawlensky] could succeed – I did it. And that faith was so great that it has endured, against all the tempests. You, you, in loving me like an imperceptible current, you have destroyed the calm, the serenity of my life. It was difficult but so intact... And the man to whom I have given all: my spirit and my heart, my inspiration and my affection, my cares and my concerns, my energy, my faith and my confidence, to whom I have opened all the treasures of my genius and of my soul, who enjoyed understanding and help – this man [Jawlensky] looks upon me with indifference and prefers kitchen-maids [domestic servant Yelena Neznakomova, who became pregnant, and gave Jawlensky his first child: a son] to me.”

Marianne von Werefkin

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Love , Life , Faith , Art