“Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it.”

—  Max Beckmann

Beckmann's lecture 'Drei Briefe an eine Malerin' ('Three letters to a Woman-painter'), New York and Boston, Spring 1948; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 214
1940s

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 "Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That …" by Max Beckmann?
Max Beckmann photo
Max Beckmann 52
German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer 1884–1950

Related quotes

James McNeill Whistler photo
Henry Adams photo

“In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Source: The Education of Henry Adams

“[Bandleader Hartley] apparently believed that music could be more powerful that physical force in bringing order to chaos.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 141

Karel Appel photo

“Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

1973 - from CF,35; p. 67
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

John Denver photo
Ralph Ellison photo

“We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp. 699-700.
Context: Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows, despite the certainties which it is the psychological function of his social institutions to give him, that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Man knows that even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational.

Stephen Sondheim photo
George Santayana photo

“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Related topics