“Could only have been painted by a madman.”

—  Edvard Munch

his inscription, written in pencil, between the red clouds on at least one of his paintings of The Scream (c. 1893 - 1910), as quoted in Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art (1977) by Ragna Thiis Stang, p. 106
after 1930

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 "Could only have been painted by a madman." by Edvard Munch?
Edvard Munch photo
Edvard Munch 29
Norwegian painter and printmaker 1863–1944

Related quotes

Paul Cézanne photo

“You positively paint like a madman.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

As quoted in: 'Mercure de France', 16 December 1908, p. 607
remark to Vincent van Gogh, ca. 1886 in Paris. Van Gogh showed Cezanne some of his recent paintings, he recently made in Paris
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

“Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report?”

Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–1963) American historian

Address at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (9 June 1957).
Context: Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

“My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterwards – by those who look for it. Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: 'He's painted a flag so you don't have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting'. The other is: 'You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don't have to choose.
The Insiders, Rejection en Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of our Time, Selden Rodman, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1960, Chapter 6.
1960s

Pricasso photo

“Pricasso, who has been painting with his penis for six years, said painting with his penis could be painful, but he had resorted to making his own non-toxic, washable paint.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Daily News staff, Daily News, South Africa, Portraiture painful for penile artist, 24 August 2011, 2, Independent Online]
About

“One could go on forever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man. But the painting I have in mind, painting in which inner and outer are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subjects and moves into the realm of the inevitable.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Barbara Rose, ‎Lee Krasner, ‎Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1983) Lee Krasner: a retrospective. p. 134.

Willem de Kooning photo

“.. the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers.... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'....(abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Willem de Kooning, MOMA Bull., pp. 4, 6; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 104.
1980's

Malcolm McDowell photo

“People think of him [Caligula] as a revolutionary or a figure of fun or a madman. There are so many aspects to him that we know really little about him, just the information that was given to us through a historian, a Roman historian called Suetonius, and he was from the other side of the family, so Suetonius paints Caligula as a very wicked madman, and that's the only reason that Suetonius considers why he did so many, on the face of it, crazy things. My interpretation of the character is not quite like that.”

Malcolm McDowell (1943) English actor

As quoted in A Documentary on the Making of Gore Vidal's Caligula [documentary] (1981), Cinemedia West Corporation

“I try to deal with things that maybe other people haven't thought about, emptiness, making a painting that isn't a painting. For years people have been concerned with what goes on inside the frame. Well maybe there is something going on outside the frame that could be considered an artistic idea.”

Robert Barry (1936) American artist

Robert Barry (1968), cited in: Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York, Praeger, 1973, p. 40. p. xii

Jackson Pollock photo

“When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a short of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

In 'Possibilities', Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947-48, p. 79; as quoted in Jackson Pollock (1983) by Elizabeth Frank, p. 68
1940's

Edward Hopper photo

“I wish I could paint more... I do dozens of sketches for oils.... if I do one that interests me I go on to make a painting but that happens only two or three times a year.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Quote in 'Travelling Man', Time January 1948
1941 - 1967

Related topics