Max Liebermann Quotes

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.

What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love.

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

That's the beauty of short films; their strength lies in delivering a message creatively and simply.

I approach video games the same way I approach theatre, filmmaking, poetry, or painting. I wish more people would take that point of view. It would help the industry to move on.

Film has its own innate poetry.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.

I have likewise made many 'skies' and effects - for I wish it could be said of me as Fuselli says of Rembrandt, 'he followed nature in her calmest abodes and could pluck a flower on every hedge - yet he was born to cast a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature'... We have had noble clouds & effects of light & dark & color.

I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.

I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.