Max Beckmann

"All important things in art since Ur of the Chaldea's, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all object…"

".. in itself is one of the manifestations of life, like disease, love, and lust. And just as I follow fear, disease, lust, love, and hate to their utmost limits, well, now I am trying war. It is all l…"

"If one perceives of it all – the entire War or even life as a whole – as a scene in the theater of 'infinity', many things are much easier to bear."

"'Departure' , yes departure from the illusion of life toward the essential things that wait behind appearance.. .We must insist that Departure is not bound to a political trend, but is symbolic for al…"

"Arrival at break of dawn. Veiled giants stood sleepily in wet mist on Manhattan.. .Yes, New York is really grandiose. But it stinks of burned fat, just like the sacrificial meal of the slain enemies a…"

"My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesqu…"

"I have such a passion for painting! I am continually working at form. In actual drawing and in my head, and during my sleep. Sometimes I think I shall go mad, this painful, sensual pleasures tires and…"

"The trenches wound in meandering lines and white faces peered from dark dugouts – a lot of men were still preparing the positions, and everywhere among them there were graves. Where they sat, beside t…"