Max Beckmann Quotes

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

When I was a young kid at art school, I loved the sensual geometry of Poliakoff, which, of course, is inherent in my own work.

Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

I try to do a lot of asymmetrical, triangular compositions - I find those work really well for comic book covers in that portrait mode, and I don't always see that in other artists.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Drawing teaches you to look at things properly and to understand form and structure.