Quotes from Max Beckmann

I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

On my left the shooting had the sharp explosion of the infantry artillery, on my right could be heard the sporadic cannon shots thundering from the front, and up above the sky was clear and the sun bright.

One of my problems is to find the Ego, which has only one form and is immortal - to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live.

Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.

In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.

I do not weep: I loathe tears, for they are a sign of slavery.

One of my problems is to find the self.

It was so wonderful outside that even the wild senselessness of this enormous death, whose music I hear again and again, could not disturb me from my great enjoyment!

I am working here (in Amsterdam) on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!

I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.

I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers.

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves.

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.

What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.

I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.

Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.

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.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

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.

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.