Painters From Germany

"As a student of Franz von Stück he Kandinsky still continued for a while to paint quite naturalistically. He admitted to me that he had always loved color, even as a child, far more than subject matter. Form and color were his main interests. To me he often remarked that 'objects disturb me'. But he could paint portraits, too."

"I met him Kandinsky shortly after my return to Germany from the United States. At first, I lived for a while in Bonn.. .A year later, in 1901, I decided to move to Munich, but still found very little encouragement as an artist. German painters refused to believe that a woman could have real talent, and I was even denied access, as a student, to the Munich Academy.. .It is significant that the first Munich artist who took the trouble to encourage me was Kandinsky, himself no German but a recent arrival from Russia."

"He Kandinsky had always expressed a great interest in abstraction when we visited Tunisia together in 1904. The Moslem interdiction of representational painting seemed to stir his imagination and that was when I first heard him say that objects disturbed him. Between 1907 and 1910 [the period in which Kandinsky painted his first abstract compositions], he began to rely increasingly on his own theories of art, which many of his friends could understand only with great difficulty."

"They [Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Paul Klee ] were constantly arguing about art and each of them, at first, had his own ideas and his own style. Jawlensky was far less intellectual than Kandinsky or Klee and was often frankly puzzled by their theories. My 1908 portrait entitled 'Zuhören' ('Listening') actually represents Jawlensky, with an expression of puzzled astonishment on his chubby face, listening to Kandinsky's new theories of art."

"We [ Kandinsky and Gabriele] came here [in Murnau, near Munich] together, on a brief visit, for the first time in 1908, in June, and we were both delighted with the town and its surroundings. In August, we then returned to Murnau for two months, with Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin.. ..Kandinsky fell in love with it [with the house in Murnau where Gabriele lived, till 1962] and said: 'You must buy it for our old age'. So I bought it and we then made it our home until he returned to Russia in 1914. Jawlensky and Marianne [Werefkin] used to stay with us here, and the people of Murnau called it: 'The House of the Russians' [only Gabriele Münter was German, of the four artists here mentioned]"

"Kandinsky was an optimist; he had been interested, at first, in fairy tales and legends and chivalrous themes of the past, but he then became increasingly interested, after 1908, in formulating what he called the art of the future rather than indulging in romantic visions of the past. Kubin, on the other hand was a pessimist, always haunted by the past and suspicious of the future. This basic difference in their temperaments made their discussions all the more fruitful, and their friendship was the more intense."

"..I need to immerse my gaze in your eyes, it is in their mirror that I see myself as I would like to be, and it is only in seeing myself as I feel I should be. I think, therefore I am, my Beautiful One, to both of us, every day we recreate the world, every day a paradise falls in our hands, to darken in the dust of many paradises.. .The paradises will fall in our hands, will sink in the dust and will be born again according to our will."

"..the rejection of impressionistic copies of nature and a move towards sensing the content, abstraction, – expressing the extract.."

"As a child, I devoted much of my leisure to drawing sketches of relatives and friends, familiar sights and scenes, a view that suddenly moved me or appealed to me. I always concentrated on depicting nature as I saw or felt it, in terms of lines, and obtaining a kind of psychological likeness which would convey the personality of my model or the mood of the moment."

"Faced with this betrayal, in utter despair, Werefkin started a journal filled with outpourings of the heart, and with recitals of her aesthetic opinions and views on art and the artist's place in society, and on relationships between men and women. Begun in 1901 and finished in 1905, the Journal ['Letters to an Unknown Man'] includes three Notebooks, each dated: I — 1901-1902; II — 1903-1904; III — 1904-1905. The confession in 'Letters to an Unknown Man' helped Marianne forgive Jawlensky; they continued living together [till 1921], and Werefkin continued to educate herself and Jawlensky."

"I don't think that Kandinsky was ever really a communist. He just happened to be in Russia [Kandinsky went to Russia in 1914, because of the outbreak of the war, ànd his Russsian nationality] and to become involved in some revolutionary artistic activities because of his reputation as a revolutionary in the arts. In any case, he left Russia as soon as an opportunity arose. But we had parted, by that time, and I prefer not to express any opinion on Kandinsky's later ideas and beliefs, with which I was never familiar."

"When I came to the United States [in 1898], I filled my sketchbook with drawings, very much as any educated girl of my generation might have kept a diary.. .My American sketches were private notations of visual experiences which I wanted to fix on paper as a personal 'memento'."

"..Jawlensky introduced me to his big friend — Marianne Vladimirovna Werefkin, also an artist, Repin's student. Her father was the commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress [in Petersburg], and the artists, including Ilya Repin, used to gather in their apartment at the fortress. With an excellent knowledge of foreign languages and financially comfortable, she bought all the newest books and magazines on art and acquainted us, who knew but little about all this, with the latest developments in art, reading to us aloud fragments from the most recent publications on art. There I heard for the first time such names as Edouard Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Whistler; Werefkin and Jawlensky then were especially fond of the latter — they saw his artwork on prints."

"A distinctive, dramatic vision of the world, the bright, rich colours entirely unrelated to objects or lighting, a somber or, in contrast, a highly intense general colouring are characteristic of Werefkin's art. Although she spent 30 years by Jawlensky's side, and several years by Kandinsky's, her manner is idiosyncratic. Her later works (starting from 1906) are made with distemper; nearly all of them are of a small size, and the artistic temperament they are injected with make them hard to confuse with other artists' works."

"How do Marc's views about the war [World War 1.] impact on our response to his art? Our appreciation of the Utopian underpinnings to [Franz] Marc's art – whether idealist representations of animals or premonitions of war – is heightened. We are made more aware of how Marc's art is linked in mood and content to European avantgarde art at this time, just as it is embedded in the tradition of German Romanticism."

"The art of the future will give form to our scientific convictions; this is our religion and our truth, and it is profound and weighty enough to produce the greatest style and the greatest revaluation of form that the world has ever seen. Today, instead of using the laws of nature as a means of artistic expression, we pose the religious problems of a new content. The art of our time will surely have profound analogies with the art of primitive periods long past, without of course, the formalistic similarities now senselessly sought by many archaist artists [Marc rejects abstraction of Cubism, among others]. And our time will just as surely be followed in some distant, ripe, late European future by another period of cool maturity, which in its turn will again set up its own formal laws and traditions. [written at the front of World War 1. - near Verdun, 1915]"

"The day is not far distant on which Europeans – the few Europeans who will still remain – will suddenly become painfully aware of their lack of formal concepts. Then will these unhappy people bewail their wretched state and become seekers after form. They will not seek the new form in the past, in the outward world, or in the stylized appearances of nature, but they will build up their form from within themselves, in the light of their new knowledge that turned the old world fable into a world form, and the old world view into a world insight. [written at the front of World War 1. - near Verdun, 1915]"

"Both of us loved blue, Franz Marc horses.. .Hence the name 'Der Blaue Reiter' [The Blue Rider - also the title of the publication in the 'Munich Almanac', edited by Kandinsky and Franz Marc]"

"We are also convinced that we can already proclaim the first signs of the time. The first works of a new era are tremendously difficult to define. Who can see clearly what their aim is and what is to come; But just the fact that they do exist and appear in many places today, sometimes independently of each other, and that they possess inner truth, makes us certain that they are the first signs of the coming new epoch.. .The hour is unique. Is it too daring to call attention to the small, unique signs of the time?"

"What appears spectral today will be natural tomorrow. Where are such signs and works? How do we recognize the genuine ones? Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.. .The present isolation of the rare, genuine artist is absolutely unavoidable for the moment.. .This fact leads us to the idea that we are standing today at the turning point of two long epochs, similar to the state of the world fifteen hundred years ago, when there was also a transitional period without art and religion - a period in which great and traditional ideas died and new and unexpected ones took their place."

"Is there any more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, or a doe, or a dog?"

"Their thinking has a different aim: To create out of their work symbols for their own time, symbols that belong on the altars of a future spiritual religion, symbols behind which the technical heritage cannot be seen. Scorn and stupidity will be like roses in their path."

"Any art is a concentrated feeling of love elevated to a world view and translated into an artistic language of symbols."

"It can be sensed that there is a new religion arising in the country, still without a prophet, recognized by no one. Religions die slowly. But the artistic style that was the inalienable possession of an earlier era collapsed catastrophically in the middle of the nineteenth century [German Romanticism? ]. There has been no style since.. .Since then, serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with 'style' because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their works arose rather in defiance of their times. They are characteristic, fiery signs of a new era that increase daily everywhere. This book [The 'Almanak'], initiated by Franz Marc & Kandinsky ] will be their focus.."

"What relation has a 'doe' to our picture of the world? Does it make any logical, or even artistic, sense, to paint the doe as it appears to our perspective vision, or in a cubistic form because we feel the world cubistically? It feels it as a doe, and its landscape must also be 'doe'.. .I can paint a picture: the roe; Pisanello has painted such. I can, however, also wish to paint a picture: 'the roe feels'. How infinitely sharper an intellect must the painter have, in order to paint this! The Egyptians have done it. The rose; Manet has painted that. Who has painted the flowering rose? The Indians.."

"In this time of the great struggle for a new art we fight like disorganized 'savages' against an old, established power. The battle seems to be unequal, but spiritual matters are never decided by numbers, only by the power of ideas. The dreaded weapons of the 'savages' are their new ideas. New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible."

"The people itself ( and I do not mean the 'masses') has always given art its essential style. The artist merely clarifies and fullfils the will of the people. But when the people does not know what it wants, or worst of all, wants nothing.. ..then its artists, driven to seeking their own forms, remain isolated, and become martyrs.. .Folk art – that is, the feeling of people for artistic form – can arise again only when the whole jumble of worn-out art concepts of the nineteenth century has been wiped from the memory of generations."

"I found time to ask [Franz Marc] about these [German Expressionist] artistic endeavors in Germany, the subject of an impassioned conflict for some time before the war. Because of my professional activity in America in the years preceding the war, I had almost no contact with German artists. Thus I had never seen any paintings by Marc or by his friend August Macke, whose death at the beginning of the war had deeply distressed Marc.. .I never had the opportunity to express to this master how deeply the spirit of his unique art moved me. What fantasy and, at the same time, what logical constructions could be discerned in Marc's creations - how consistent this development had been from his impressionist beginnings to the abstract compositions of his last years!"

"..upon the frightening gray sky one can see a black mountain, completely black even with black houses, and all of a sudden a fire-red house appears, a violet path with snowflakes and on the path a black chain of people like crows."

"Who are these 'savages' in Germany? For the most part they are both well-known and widely disparaged: Die Brücke in Dresden, the 'Neue Sezession' in Berlin, and 'Die Neue Vereinigung' in Munich."

"..he [ Jawlensky ] is the creation of my life, my ultimate goal, my torture."

"One life is far too little for all the things I feel within myself, and I invent other lives within and outside myself for them. A whirling crowd of invented beings surrounds me and prevents me from seeing reality. Color bites at my heart."

"Don't worry, I will come through, and I'm also fine as far as my health goes. I feel well and watch myself."

"It is impossible to explain the recent works of these 'savages' as a formal development and new interpretation of Impressionism.. .The most beautiful prismatic colors and the celebrated Cubism are now meaningless goals for these 'savages'."

"There is little abstract art, today, and what there is is stammering and imperfect. It is an attempt to let the world speak for itself, instead of reporting the speech of mind excited by their picture of the world. The Greek, The Gothic, and the Renaissance artist set forth the world the way he saw it, felt it, and wished to have it; man wished above all to be nourished by art; he achieved his desire but sacrificed everything else to this one aim: to construct homunculus, to substitute knowledge for strength and skill for spirit. The ape aped his creator. He learned to put art itself to the ends of trade.."

"In war we are all equal, but among a thousand good men, a bullet hit an irreplaceable one.. .We painters know well that with the loss of his harmony [ of August Macke ], the color in German art will become many shades paler.."

"And I go to my room and stretch out my arms to the West—that it is far away [from here], that I will someday return. Outside those painful sensations—it is horrible to be before these people and their lives. Service and family troubles -a hard beginning, pay raise, promotion - sweet dreams, scandal - daily bread, [This is a figurative reference to Our Lord's Prayer, "give us this day our daily bread.."] and their happiness reminds me sweetly, of those who buy "for the people," and whose food you wouldn't put in your mouth. I think of Munich and of my health. All that is here is suffering and this horror of beauty and this horrible life and this overbearing literature, and the complete superfluousness of art."

"The impure men and women who surrounded me (and particularly the men), did not arouse any of my real feelings; while the natural feeling for life possessed by animals set in vibration everything good in me. [from the front of World War 1.]."

"My eyes are magical glass [when looking at] the outside world, and it can transform a lot into bewitching beauty. Paris, Munich.. ..they're all the same. The country is nice, because it is closer to nature and bad because we [Werefkin and Jawlensky] are no longer people from nature. I saw this at Blagodat. The more a person improves himself, the more one is doomed to loneliness. One doesn't need friends, one needs oneself and anybody who loves you like themselves."

"I save myself in a church. Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons. One sings everything that one has sung before in the past. Some black figures - and the heart is heavy. The tears take one's breath away and the past rises up again. Home.. ..in Peter's office [Marianne's brother, governor of Kovno Province, Lithuania], my entire soul starts to ache for him, for that battle for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life. Empty, empty in the house, no one. Whoever comes - doesn't get his fill of him. And then such a heated rush of love rips out of the [visitor's] heart, begging one's pardon and forgetting the trouble behind, that the whole house swells."

"There is something impressive and mystical about the artillery battles.. .I still do not think differently about the war.. .It simply seems to me feeble and lifeless to consider it vulgar and dumb. I dream of a new Europe, I.. ..see in this war the healing, if also gruesome, path to our goals; it will purify Europe, and make it ready… Europe is doing the same things to her body France did to hers during the Revolution.. ..the war is not turning me into a realist – on the contrary: I feel so strongly the meaning which hovers behind the battles, behind every bullet, so that the realism, the materialism disappears completely. Battles, wounds, motions, all appear so mystical, unreal.."

"It is like a presentiment of the war, terrible and gripping; I can hardly realize that I painted it myself [remark on his painting 'The fate of Animals', he created in 1913]. In the hazy photograph, at any rate, it has an indefinable reality that quite made my flesh creep. It is artistically logical to paint such paintings 'before' a war, not as stupid reminiscences 'after' a war. [Marc was in 1915 soldier in World War 1.]. For one should paint constructive, prophetic pictures, not souvenirs, as is the usual fashion. And those are all I have in mind. It used to puzzle me sometimes, but now I know why it has to be like that. But these old pictures [his paintings, he made before the War] from the autumn Salon are sure to be resurrected again.."

"It is impossible to explain the latest works of these wild men | that is, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, and Die Brücke, [working in Munich, and Berlin] in terms of a formal evolution and a reinterpretation of Impressionism. The loveliest prismatic colors and the famous Cubist style have become meaningless in terms of the objectives of the iconoclasts. Their thinking has a different aim: with their labor, they want to create symbols for their era. symbols that belong on the altars of the coming spiritual religions behind which the technical producer will vanish."

"The convoluted relationship between Werefkin and Jawlensky needs clarification, particularly because of its impact on Werefkin's working life. Although Werefkin has often been referred to as Jawlensky's muse or mentor, in actuality their relationship was a good deal more complex than that would imply; in fact, they lived for many years [till 1921, then they separated and Marianne left for Italy] in a ménage a trois [together with Werefkin's domestic servant Yelena Neznakomova, who was pregnant in 1902, with Jawlensky as the father]."

"Yes, we [Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter,] shared very much the same tastes and ideas, when we lived together in this house (the 'Russian house' in Murnau]. She was extremely perceptive and intelligent, but Alexej von Jawlensky (her 'husband' but not married] didn't always approve of her work.. .Suddenly Jawlensky would pick on some tiny detail of one of Marianne's best and most original pictures and exclaim: 'That patch of color, there, is laid on much too flat and smoothly. It's just like old Riepin [Russian painter [[w:Ilya Repin|Ilya Repin], and former art teacher of Marianne ànd Jawlensky]. Of course it was nonsense and he was only saying it to annoy her. But Jawlensky really was a devotee of the 'touche de peinture' of the French Fauvists, rather than an innovator..."

"I cannot get over the strange conflict between my estimation of their ideas [the artists of Italian Futurism ] most of which I find brilliant and fruitful, and my view of the [their] pictures [he saw on the Walden exhibition in Berlin, Spring 2012], which strike me as, without a doubt, utterly mediocre."

"I love Russia as few people do - I've demonstrated it my whole life, but those who plow here in Russia, are not my brothers. I heed a Russian life with my entire existence, I look into the eyes of all the people around me, nothing.. .And the main horror is that we long for Russia and here no one loves her, they only mimic those feelings."

"'Amazon of the 'Blue Rider' / 'Blaue Reiter' (in original German: 'Des Blauen Reiterreiterin')."

"I can in no other way overcome my imperfections and the imperfections of life than by translating the meaning of my existence into the spiritual, into that which is independent of the mortal body, that is, the abstract."

"For days I have seen nothing but the most awful scenes that the human mind can imagine.. .Stay calm and don't worry: I will come back to you – the war will end this year. I must stop; the transport of the wounded, which will take this letter along, is leaving. Stay well and calm as I do. [from the battlefield at Verdun]"