Painters From Germany

"Light, colour, love - let me come under your spell. Life can be represented only by a lively kind of painting. There is clarity in passion."

"Everything is love. "HEAVEN ON EARTH" our idea of heaven has been formed by painting and nothing else. I love pure, bright colours, their intellectual clarity of expression conveying nothing but feeling. Painting - the inspired animation of the surface."

"The power of memory - magic- myth - abstract beauty. I paint pictures that have never been seen before. Visions of another world. At once sensuous and intellectual."

"A painting grows like a plant. Use all colours, all shapes. Everything that attracts and excites me is a part of me. Painting is about proportions, relationships which breathe life. "Painting is a harmony which runs parallel to nature"."

"As a means of expression, painting must deliver universally valid statements, make allegorical reflections on life, and create new mythologies."

"Paintings are complex puzzles in the twilight world between abstraction and figuration. I use the medium in a simple, unsophisticated way to express what I don't see expressed anywhere else."

"What is the secret behind the emotional effect of great works of painting? What laws govern their beauty? Delacroix said that being a feast for the eyes is the prime merit of a good painting. I seek the timeless, the quintessential in painting."

"My garden, by the sea"

"About 80 percent of our customers buy our shoes not to compete in, but to wear in their leisure time."

"I'm a clown with brush and color."

"I think Joseph Beuys is the most missunderstood artist of the 20th century. He opened a door into art for any idiot and now they traipse around believing that they have to bestow their favour on this rubbish, although it has absolutely nothing to say."

"Our play's chief aim has been to take to bits Great propositions and their opposites, See how they work, and let them fight it out, To point some light on our eternal doubt. Marat and I both advocated force But in debate each took a different course. Both wanted changes, but his views and mine On using power never could combine. On the one side, he who thinks our lives Can be improved by axes and knives, Or he who, submerged in the imagination, Seeking a personal annihilation."

"I've twisted and turned them every way, And can see no ending to our play."

"We can say what we like without favour or fear and what we can't say we can breathe in your ear"

"What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling I'd like to know who they think they are fooling They told us that torture was over and gone but everyone knows the same torture goes on"

"Long ago I abandoned my masterpiece a roll of paper thirty yards long which I filled completely with minute handwriting in my dungeon years ago It vanished when the Bastille fell it vanished as everything written everything thought and planned will disappear"

"What's the point of a revolution without general copulation copulation copulation"

"Don't be deceived when our Revolution has been finally stamped out and they tell you things are better now Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which these new industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you"

"Fight on land and sea All men want to be free If they don't never mind we'll abolish all mankind"

"Once and for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out Neither side is glorious On either side they're just frightened men messing their pants and they all want the same thing Not to lie under the earth but to walk upon it without crutches"

"Marat Today they need you because you are going to suffer for them They need you and they honour the urn which holds your ashes Tomorrow they will come back and smash that urn and they will ask Marat who was Marat"

"And now Marat now I see where this revolution is heading To the withering of the individual man and a slow merging into uniformity to the death of choice to self denial to deadly weakness in a state which has no contract with individuals but which is impregnable"

"Against Nature's silence I use action In the vast indifference I invent a meaning I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes"

"And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice and they turned away their faces and said Our kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage The soul lives on humility and patience at the same time screwing from the poor their last centime They settled down among their treasures and ate and drank with princes and to the starving they said Suffer Suffer as he suffered on the cross for it is the will of God"

"Every death even the cruellest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race I hate Nature this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face that can bear everything this goads us to greater and greater acts"

"So the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness"

"We've got rights the right to starve We've got jobs waiting for work We're all brothers lousy and dirty We're all free and equal to die like dogs"

"Charlotte Corday walked alone Paris birds sang sugar calls Charlotte walked down lanes of stone through the haze of perfume stalls Charlotte smelt the dead's gangrene Heard the singing guillotine"

"We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out We invented the Revolution but we don't know how to run it Look everyone wants to keep something from the past a souvenir of the old regime This man decides to keep a painting This one keeps his mistress He [pointing] keeps his garden He [pointing] keeps his estate He keeps his country house He keeps his factories This man couldn't part with his shipyards This one kept his army and that one keeps his king"

"Don't soil your pretty little shoes The gutter's deep and red Climb up climb up and ride along with me the tumbrel driver saidBut she never said a word never turned her headDon't soil your pretty little pants I only go one way Climb up climb up and ride along with me There's no gold coach todayBut she never said a word never turned her head"

"I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. … That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country."

"In Dante the hero would rather flee and renounce the tempting embrace instead of yielding to his desires and enduring the attendant dangers."

"Singers: We've got nothing always had nothing nothing but holes and millions of them Kokol: Living in holes Polpoch: Dying in holes Cucurucu: Holes in our bellies Rossignol: and holes in our clothes"

"Only in his poetry did he have the courage to love."

"Here is a man who has discovered the tragedy of landscape."

"Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic.. ..They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented."

"This picture [ 'Man and Woman contemplating the Moon',] full of sentiment and the quietness of nature, was painted by Friedrich in 1819 and he gave it to me in exchange for one of my own works. Friedrich had to copy it several times, but he did not approve of this, hence others copied it as well. Only the deserved destination for the picture, the Royal Picture Gallery, could convince me to part with it."

"In landscape it was Friedrich above all whose profound and vigorous mind, with total originality, laid hold of this tangle of banality, staleness, and tedium and—cutting through it with a mordant melancholy — raised from its midst a distinctively new and radiant poetic tendency."

"It is magnificent to stand in infinite solitude on the seashore, beneath an overcast sky, and to look on an endless waste of water. Part of this feeling is the fact that one has made life's way there and yet must go back, that one would like to cross over but cannot, that one sees nothing to support life and yet senses the voice of life in the sigh of the waves, the murmur of the air, the passing clouds and the lonely cry of birds."

"Part of this feeling is a claim made by the heart and a rejection, if I may call it that, on the part of nature. But this is impossible in front of the picture, and what I should have found in the picture itself I found only between myself and the picture, namely a claim my heart made on the picture and the picture's rejection of me; and so I myself became the monk, and the picture became the dune, but the sea itself, on which I should have looked out with longing — the sea was absent."

"Friedrich, with his somewhat stiff and diffuse but highly poetic manner, was the first artist — in painting as a whole, but more especially in landscape painting — who ever assailed and shook up the philistines of Dresden. There had been a great stir when one of his paintings, a crucifix on a rock beneath dark fir trees and against the dying glow of an evening sky, had given rise to a literary controversy conducted on Friedrich's behalf by his friend Gerhard von Kügelchen [Kügelgen] and on the opposing side by a prosaic dilettante, a certain Herr von Ramdohr — to the latter's eventual discomfiture."

"There can be nothing sadder or more desolate in the world than this place: the only spark of life in the broad domain of death, the lonely center in the lonely circle. The picture, with its two or three mysterious subjects (monk, dune, sea), lies there like an apocalypse.."

"..I must not neglect to report to you the three friends I have won. The firsts the composer Carl Maria [von] Weber.. ... the second, the landscape painter Friedrich.. ..His paintings are actually lyrical poems.. ..I described for him lately, when we conversed of suchlike moods, the rare beauty of the moonlight that we [Hjort and Olivia Rasbech] observed as we wandered past the old limestone kiln, and my words fell so fortuitously that he burst out: Das mach ich Ihnen! [I shall paint that for you!].. ..prepared to take my leave he said: Give me the lady's address the next time we meet, and you shall find that upon your return from this voyage, the painting shall adorn her wall.. .. At the very next meeting between us, he demanded to be shown your portrait, which I naturally had in my possession, and he already had a first draft of the painting, which he showed to me with these very words: Nicht wahr? So war's? [That’s how it was, wasn't it?].. .I hesitated for a few weeks, but then I had to yield, upon which he solemnly declared: Ein festes Auge, das ist jafast wie ein Knäblein! Mag's einen herrlichen Charakter geben, wenn sie ins Leben tritt [A firm gaze; it is almost like that of a small boy! May it give her a delightful character when she steps out into life]."

"On the day he is painting air he may not be spoken to!"

"Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea, he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even went on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, which led him to murmur: 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!'"

"Whenever a storm with thunder and lightning moved over the sea, he would hurry out to the top of the cliffs as if he had a pact of friendship with the forces of nature, or even went on into the oakwood where the lightning had split a tall tree from top to bottom, which led him to murmur: 'How great, how mighty, how wonderful!' Thus a friend remembered the wanderings of Caspar David Friedrich as a young painter on the Baltic island of Rugen in 1802. It was Friedrich's favorite posture: Homo romanticus out in the weather, saluting the crag."

"He [Friedrich] was indeed a strange mixture of temperament, his moods ranging from the gravest seriousness to the gayest humor.. ..But anyone who knew only this side of Friedrich's personality, namely his deep melancholic seriousness, only knew half the man. I have met few people who have such a gift for telling jokes and such a sense of fun as he did, providing that he was in the company of people he liked."

"What a picture of death this landscape is!.. ..one shudders when looking at it."

"[Friedrich] worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting.."

"..it was a picture of the kind that only an aeronaut can see, when he rises in his airship above the height of the clouds.. ..up to where.. ..the untroubled blue of the heaven is visible between the wisps of mist."