“Down there it's still Summer, I suppose, whereas our sun [in Switzerland] is already gilding the mountains and the larches are turning yellow, but the colours are wonderful, like old, dark red satin. Down here in the valley the huts stand out in the strongest Paris blue against the yellow fields. Here one really learns the values of the individual colours for the first time. And the harsh, monumental lines of the mountains.”

— Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Letter to Nele van de Velde ((daughter of Henry van de Velde), from Frauenkirch, 13 October 1918; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 223-224
1916 - 1919

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Down there it's still Summer, I suppose, whereas our sun [in Switzerland] is already gilding the mountains and the larc…" by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner?

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner photo

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner54

German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker 1880–1938

Related quotes

“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“We have seven colours — violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red (Roy G. Biv). Our atmosphere has a number of particles and when light falls on them, it gets scattered. With blue colour having less wavelength and more scattering qualities, it scatters and makes the sky blue. While red colour has opposite qualities than blue so traffic lights are of this colour.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

His observations on the "strange events in our solar system" and as to why the sky looked blue and red colour was used in traffic lights to signal to vehicles to stop.
When Prof Jayant Narlikar saw the sun rise in the west

“In 1942 when I was in New York, I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You are there, you talk to someone, and all of a sudden he turns blue. Then the colour fades - another one comes and turns him red or yellow. The colour – the colour of neon advertising is free; it exists in space. I wanted to do the same in my canvases.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from Legér and America, exhibition catalogue Fernand Léger, Buffalo 1982, p. 52
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1980's

“I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

“To be white, red, yellow, or black is to be a painter. Today it is not sufficient for the painter to think of colour; he should be colour, feed on colour and transform himself into painting. That is the essential thing. To feel like colour means to carry within oneself the entire range of colours, not as a treasure, but as a trust.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Van Doesburg's article 'Elementarism', as cited in De Stijl – Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932, pp. 17–19
1926 – 1931

“What is true about heat and pain is also true about colour. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. It can only have a colour -- red, blue, yellow -- in the invisible life where the colour is felt, on the basis of 'feeling oneself' (se sentir soi-même). Life's feeling of itself and its feeling of colour is a pathos. Colour is not linked to a tonality through an external and contingent association that would vary with individuals. In the phenomenological substance of its flesh and being, colour is a sensation and subjectivity; it is this affective tonality and inner tone.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 71
Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)

“Colour-blindness always extends to the complementary colours. Those who are red blind are also green blind; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mental phenomena; it is a fundamental condition of consciousness.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 110.

“If upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red – every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior... If I paint a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow, and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one another..”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1905 - 1910, Notes d'un Peintre' (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 411

“The yellow moon turned orange and was soon red as the setting sun.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22 (1961), pp. 462

“First: my Friend planted a Row of Indian corn that was Coloured Red and Blue; the rest of the Field being planted with corn of the yellow, which is the most usual color. To the Windward side, this Red and Blue Row, so infected Three or Four whole Rows, as to communicate the same Colour unto them; and part of ye Fifth and some of ye Sixth. But to the Leeward Side, no less than Seven or Eight Rows, had ye same Colour communicated unto them; and some small Impressions were made on those that were yet further off.”

Cotton Mather (1663–1728) American religious minister and scientific writer

As quoted in Zirkle, Conway (1935), The beginnings of plant hybridization p. 105

Related topics