Painters From Germany

"Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history."

"This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture / Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism."

"Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'."

"No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism..."

"I go to the typical state school and try to infiltrate it. Yes!.. .One can do something in the institutions in trying to infiltrate them, and outside one can do something to set a model in place.. .One must work with divers methods anyway. One must always carry on with what is possible."

"I just want to encourage everyone to take this into their own hands, the educational process.. .We don't need a brilliant talent somewhere. Precisely the ability that one has at the moment must be put to work."

"School is universal. That means, on the street – when you talk about these things with people at the grocer's; the school is at the grocer's at that moment."

"I want to found a free school for creativity and interdisciplinary research in Düsseldorf [where Beuys was teaching at the Art Academy]. I hope that I will succeed. Everyone can come to me. This school has a legal status.. .First a school is there to develop ability, that is consciousness, then the children will recognize what a future social structure should look like; that means that one can learn a social feeling or a social sense..."

"For example, when we leave [The Documenta in] Kassel, a working group or maybe two working groups will work on things here at Kassel. We want to cause a snow-ball effect. We want to build a network throughout Europe that will work on these things, right? I can only say: we can only do it as well as possible."

"We have to ensure that it is structured organically, so that it functions like a person functions internally, like the organs function.. .First in the examination of the matter. Secondly in that one develops a concept of.. ..a social order that have never existed before. That simply means: to realize freedom, democracy and socialism – free democratic socialism."

"Yes, now we are at the starting-point again. Now we are at our real issue: that we understand ourselves first as sites of education, for information for democracy, for tree-part structure, and so on."

"For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.. ..the power of evolution. But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language.. .Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information."

"It is a kind of vehicle, you know. It's a kind of making, spreading out ideas, that is what I think. It spreads out the idea. You must care for information and I personally try to make information available not only in a written way.. .I try also to work with images, with fantasy, with jokes, with humor. It accelerates the discussion of the problem of a new society.. ..so I work coming from the idea of art as the most important means to transform the society."

"QUESTION: A well-known saying of yours asserts that 'Every man is an artist.' If every man is an artist, then why have art academies and art professors at all?"

"My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture.. ..or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone."

"I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated."

"I try to go further on over the threshold where modern art ends and anthropological art has to start."

"For instance the idea of intuition, imagination, inspiration.. ..is related in the principle to an invisible world.. ..when I call these drawings 'The Secret Block' then I try to stress this part of reality as the most important part because spiritual existence is firstly.. .I find if we are only confronted with this hard part of the world, this already done part of the world, we are not.. ..related to the whole idea of reality.. ..the mission of the art is to make visible the whole reality.."

"It is a special kind of secret how these Asiatic elements [of American Indians] came over the Bering Strait long ago. It's the same with the coyote. When I worked with the coyote [this quote refers to the performance by Beuys when he was locked up together with a coyote in a cage for a few days in René Block Gallery, New York City in 1974], I had the idea that it was not an indigenous animal. It came as a wolf with the Indians over the Bering Strait. And this Asiatic wolf, or step wolf, changed his whole biological configuration and behavior. Then it was my idea to import the coyote once more back to Europe, and you could see it [the coyote] change back to the European wolf or Siberian wolf. It is a transformed European wolf, the coyote, how it came to the character of a brush wolf."

"Creativity is not limited to people practising one of the traditional forms of art, and even in the case of artists, creativity is not confined to the exercise of their art. Each one of us has a creative potential, which is hidden by competitiveness and success-aggression. To recognize, explore and develop this potential is the task of the School. Creation – whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or novel – involves not merely talent, intuition, powers of imagination and application, but also the ability to shape material that could be expanded to other socially relevant spheres."

"'Fat' traverses the path from a chaotically dispersed, undirected energy form to a form. Then it appears in the famous fat corner.. ..now [a wedge of fat in the angle between seat and back of the wooden old Chair, Beuys used in the fat-sculpture, like 'Stuhl mit Fett' (Fet Chair), 1964] intersects the human body in the region that houses certain emotional forces [Beuys laughed, and so did everyone else of the public]."

"my art cannot be understood primarily by thinking. My art touches people who are in tune with my mode of thinking. But it is clear that people cannot understand my art by intellectual processes alone, because no art can be experienced in that way."

"Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done."

"But while he [Grosz] painted all this violence, we can see from his first drawings onward that he had an ambivalent attitude towards it: he rejected it, and at the same time was fascinated by it. In this respect, he has had some influence on what I do. Grosz's ambivalence is something that I have in myself.. .This is a great paradox of art and literature – what is despicable in life can be very attractive and appealing in art. You nourish yourself with everything that you hate."

"Some of the names Grosz gave himself in letters written between 1913 and 1920 are "Prof Thomas," "Ritter von Thorn," "Gogo," "Dr. Maschin George Ventil," and, complete with place of residence "Lord HattonDixon, New Castle Town," and "Edgar H. Hussler, Boston." He often signed drawings with "Boff" (or "Boffel" or "Fobb"; see number 6 of 'Gott mit uns'); this was a variation on "Boeuf," which was his friends' nickname for him. There is often an element of Dadaist alienation and also of straightforward in this, but not always."

"George Grosz gave a fantastic testimony of Berlin life during a terrible period, divided between fascism and communism. He was active in the communist party but had an anarchist's fascination for the characters of underground life. Military figures, prostitutes and violence abound, and fascinate the viewer.. ..this meant he instinctively rooted his art in the common people. It also explains, I think, why caricature and graphic design in magazines and newspapers held such an appeal for him."

"[Grosz] publicly stated that he was neither Christian nor pacifist, but was actively motivated by an inner need to create these pictures", and was finally acquitted after two appeals."

"The court ordered the artist Grosz to pay a fine of 300 marks and the publisher Herzfelde to pay 600 marks, ordered the plates and printing forms to be confiscated and destroyed, and assigned publication rights to the ministry - Dada!"

"This cynic is a secret moralist. Negation is merely his manner of speaking; what he really.. ..loves is the positive. One might think: one little push, and he would he painting pictures full of ecstasy and mysticism. It is his personal bad luck that he is condemned to be a caricaturist. In any case he is never going to be a humorist like Wilhelm Busch, one of the comfortable kind. There is no telling that he will become. For the time being we recall the old saying that yes and no are very close neighbors, in life and in art."

"My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry."

"A great deal that had become frozen within me in Germany melted here in America and I rediscovered my old yearning for painting. I carefully and deliberately destroyed a part of my past."

"A composition should be simple and clear. That is why the drawings of children and primitives are so strong."

"Yes, [to] the Communist party! [the presiding judge asked Grosz: 'Do you belong to a political party?']"

"Árt is dead. Long live Tatlin's new machine art."

"I see the future development of painting taking place in workshops.. ..not in any holy temple of the arts. Painting is manual labor, no different from any other. It can be done well or poorly."

"Art today is an absolutely secondary matter. Anyone who is able to look further than the walls of his own studio can see this.. .All the same, art is a business that demands a very clear decision from anyone who undertakes it. It is not immaterial where you stand in this business.. .Are you on the side of the exploiters or on that of the masses, who want to wring the exploiters' necks?"

"Day after day gasped away, slowly seep hours when fettered or immured, only at times does imagination scale the palisades that the spirit of chaos and confusion, the spirit of reactionary bombast, has set up around us - dreams, dreams of endless, destructive hate! Mists of hate, beclouding the burning brain!"

"I am lonely without measure; that is to say, I am alone with my doubles, phantasms in whom I realize specific dreams, ideas, inclinations, and so on. I rip three other people out of my inner life, give them names, and believe in them myself. Gradually three clearly defined types have emerged: *1: Grosz. *2: Count Ehrenfried, the nonchalant aristocrat with the well-manicured fingernails, concerned only with cultivating himself; in a word, the detached, aristocratic individualist. *3: The physician. Dr. William King Thomas, the more American, practical counterweight to Grosz the mother figure."

"The art of pictorial creation is so complicated — it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization."

"Hofmann had a heavy hand, a virtual inability to hold back, whether he was spreading planes of paint across a surface or drawing his own features with firm, broad strokes of a thick pen. Much of his extant work turns the volume to fortissimo, from the rapidly worked 'wet-into-wet' interiors of the 1930's to the abstractions of the 1950's and 1960's, in which patches of paint and emphathic shreds of drawing appear to have been slapped on to the canvas or squeezed directly from the tube."

"[being a young woman-artist in the w:Artists Club in New York]... .How did I feel, like how? I felt, you know, when I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn't paint, the way all the men said they [the women] couldn't paint.. ...Hans Hofmann was very supportive - of me. I used to run into him in the park. I'd be dog-walking at nine in the morning, he'd say, 'Mitchell, you should be painting.' Very nice. [both chuckle] I don't think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the 'lady painter.'"

"And I came [to New York, 1945].. ..to study with Hofmann.. .And I went to Hofmann's class and I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified. But he and I became friends later on. Friends, but I never studied with him.."

"When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock [her husband] and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was — one of the questions he asked Jackson was, 'do you work from nature?' There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, 'I am nature.' And Hofmann's reply was, 'Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself.' To which Jackson did not reply at all."

"Walking into his home was like walking into one of his paintings; the floor was kelly green, the furniture painted in yellows, reds, pink, white etc. Fresh fruit and flowers, perhaps a wicker rocker. Always a joy."

"A passionate teacher, he got his students to work! I studied with Hans for three weeks in Provincetown, summer 1950. Having had a thorough lesson in Cubism well before I knew him, perhaps I was never one of his many student disciples but a great admirer. To this day I think he remains extremely overlooked as an artist and an influence."

"Hofmann's abstraction is hard won: it comes from depicting the world around him. Over the years his paintings cover a vast territory: they are uneven in quality, various in style; he paints his own history of the most relevant 20th Century art, a kind of Hofmannesque Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism."

""Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface'" (Arp). Only love — for painting, in this instance — is able to cover the fearful void."

"Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture ... black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface."

"A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops."

"as quoted in Jackson Pollock, Ellen G Landau, p. 259, as quoted in Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Ines Janet Engelmann, Prestel Verlag Munich, 2007, p. 66"