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'.

Max Beckmann

I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.

Max Beckmann

invisible bridges reality

The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves.

Max Beckmann

real secret lying

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

Max Beckmann

creative play art

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

Max Beckmann

quality figures trying

Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, (Beckmann lived in the center of Amsterdam during World War 2.) an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.

Max Beckmann

ocean space war

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

Max Beckmann

degradation vision order

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.

Max Beckmann

torment play art

Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.

Max Beckmann

deities infinite space

The greatest mystery of all is reality.

Max Beckmann

mystery reality

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

Max Beckmann

painting achievement

We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression, the infinite seas, the wild rocks, the melancholy language of the black trees in the snow, the wild strength of spring flowers and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer day when Pan, our old friend, sleeps and the ghosts of midday whisper. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form.

Max Beckmann

grief summer spring

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

Max Beckmann

infinity depth space

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.

Max Beckmann

bridges reality ideas

What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.

Max Beckmann

what-matters real secret

I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.

Max Beckmann

painting objectivity believe

One thing is sure - we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas.. ..To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.

Max Beckmann

dimensions magic two

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.

Max Beckmann

fairy-tale average art

The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.

Max Beckmann

stronger records desire

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.

Max Beckmann

philosophical eye blessed

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

Max Beckmann

enough-already real mean