Max Beckmann: Quotes about painting

“The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs... May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work – in spite of everything”

Max Beckmann

a. o. using his bed sheets as canvas for the new paintings
letter to de:Stephan Lackner, Amsterdam, 27 August 1945, as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, pp. 80 + 86
1940s

Hunger , War , World , Time

“And then I awoke and yet continued to dream… painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. I thought of my grand old friend Henri Rousseau [French Primitive painter, died in 1910] that Homer in the porter's lodge whose prehistoric dreams have sometimes brought me near the gods. I saluted him in my dream. Near him I saw William Blake, noble emanation of English genius...'Have confidence in your objects,' he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'... I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened. Peacefully I laid my head among the pillows… to sleep, and dream, again.”

Max Beckmann

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

God , World , Dreams , Confidence

“I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradation and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture”

Max Beckmann

letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, 1915; as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 5
1900s - 1920s

God , Pleasure , World , Painting

“Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul – thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to the real and political life. I assume, though, that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you [the audience] to decide which is the more important.”

Max Beckmann

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 18

Life , World , Soul , Reality

“It is not the subject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting. Therefore 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

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 12-13

Painting

“I have such a passion for painting! I am continually working at form. In actual drawing and in my head, and during my sleep. Sometimes I think I shall go mad, this painful, sensual pleasures tires and torments me so much. Everything else vanishes, time and space, and I think of nothing but how to paint the head of the resurrected Christ... Or how shall I paint Minkchen [his wife Minna] now, with her knees drawn up and her head leaning on her hand against the yellow wall with her rose, or the sparkling light in the dazzling whiteness of the anti-aircraft shell-bursts in the leaden, sun drenched sky…”

Max Beckmann

letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, 11 May, 1915; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 213
1900s - 1920s

Pain , Pleasure , Thinking , Sleep

“Oh I wish that I could paint again. Paint is an instrument without which I cannot survive for any length of time. Whenever I even think of gray, green and white, I am overcome with quivers of lust. Then I wish that this war would end and that I might paint again.”

Max Beckmann

Quote from Beckmann's letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, first World war, 1915; as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 14
Quote of Max Beckmann, one from a series of letters he wrote to his wife Minna Beckmann-Tube, being medic soldier at the front of World War 1.
1900s - 1920s

War , Thinking , Time , Painting

“Departure' [also the title of a famous triptych painting of Max Beckmann], yes departure from the illusion of life toward the essential things that wait behind appearance... We must insist that Departure is not bound to a political trend, but is symbolic for all times.”

Max Beckmann

In a letter to his art dealer Curt Valentin, Amsterdam, 11 February 1938; as quoted in Max Beckmann – On my Painting in the preface, Mayen Beckmann; Tate Publishing London, 2003
1930s

Life , Departure , Appearance , Time

“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.”

Max Beckmann

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

Wisdom , Beauty , Sense , Painting

“My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality in painting – to make the invisible visible through reality... What helps me most in this task is the penetration of space. 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. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.”

Max Beckmann

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 12

Reality , Help , Painting

“Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul... It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space. Something of this is perhaps contained in my pictures.”

Max Beckmann

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 14

Way , Exercises , Soul , Mountain