Max Beckmann Quotes
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.
Beckmann, Max. "Letter to Minna Tube, 18 April 1915." Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait in Words, Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950, edited by Barbara Copeland Buenger, University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 154.
Prior to whites settling in America, various Indian tribes had a long history of fierce fighting for control of Kentucky. The Transylvania Land company negotiated for the “rights” to Kentucky. Dragging Canoe, who opposed the treaty, argued that the land had a bad history and would be very difficult to settle. Poet Theodore O’Hara described Kentuckians as “Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground” in his poem, The Bivouac of the Dead.
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. His work became full of horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and social criticism.
