Quote

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

Max Beckmann

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Max Beckmann
Age: 66 †
Born: 1884
Born: February 12
Died: 1950
Died: December 27
Draftsperson
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Painter
Printmaker
Sculptor
University Teacher
Writer
Max Beckman
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann
m. beckmann
Beckmann
Figures
Divested
Quality
Accidental
Come
Suggested
Trying
Misfortune
Apparent
Misfortunes
Accidents
Fortune

More quotes by Max Beckmann

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I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
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There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.
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Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.
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What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.
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What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence.
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Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.
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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!
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The greatest mystery of all is reality.
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In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.
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When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.
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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.
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If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.
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My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.
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The metaphysics of substance. The strange feeling which comes over us when we sense: this is skin - this is bone - all in a single vision that is completely unearthly. The dreaminess of our existence mixed at the same time with the indescribably sweet illusion of reality.
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All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.
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The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings.
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One of my problems is to find the self.
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What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invisible, rather as a famous cabalist once said, 'If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible'.
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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.
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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 degradations 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
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