People From Leipzig

"Ist der weibliche Schwachsinn nicht nur vorhanden, sondern auch nothwendig, er ist nicht nur ein physiologisches Factum, sondern auch ein physiologisches Postulat. Wollen wir ein Weib, das ganz seinen Mutterberuf erfüllt, so kann es nicht ein männliches Gehirn haben. ... Die modernen Närrinnen sind schlechte Gebärerinnen und schlechte Mütter. In dem Grade, in dem die „Civilisation“ wächst, sinkt die Fruchtbarkeit, je besser die Schulen werden, um so schlechter werden die Wochenbetten, um so geringer wird die Milchabsonderung, kurz, um so untauglicher werden die Weiber."

"Without a medical evaluation you cannot understand anybody. It is intolerable to see men and their actions judged by linguists and other armchair pundits. They have no inkling that more is needed here than moralizing and the average knowledge of people...we have to abandon the prevalent old division into healthy and sick minds. Everybody is pathological to a certain degree...the more so the more elevated his standing....Only myth and cliché have it that a person must be either sane or crazy."

"It is with mathematics not otherwise than it is with music, painting or poetry. Anyone can become a lawyer, doctor or chemist, and as such may succeed well, provided he is clever and industrious, but not every one can become a painter, or a musician, or a mathematician: general cleverness and industry alone count here for nothing."

"Persons, who have a decided mathematical talent, constitute, as it were, a favored class. They bear the same relation to the rest of mankind that those who are academically trained bear to those who are not."

"With the exception of Madame Schumann there is no woman and there will not be any women employed in the Conservatory. As for Madame Schumann, I count her as a man."

"My heart bled as I said goodnight to Felix and went to the concert. The contrast was so dreadful. Throughout the entire concert I saw only him, his emaciated body, his lifeless appearance, and alas, his lack of breath–it was horrible. And yet I played quite well, without even one wrong note!"

"I stood at the body of my dearly loved husband and was calm; all my feelings were of thankfulness to God that he was finally free, and as I knelt at his bed I had such a holy feeling. It was as if his magnificent spirit hovered above me, oh–if he had only taken me with him!"

"Music is now quite another thing for me than it used to be. How blissful, how full of longing it sounds; it is indescribable ... I could wear myself out now at the piano, my heart is eased by the tones and what sympathy it offers! ... Oh, how beautiful music is; so often it is my consolation when I would like to cry."

"I’ve been playing the songs by Liszt, with which you so surprised me, with great enthusiasm, especially “Gretchen,” “Erlkönig,” and “Sei mir gegrüßt.” Is Liszt coming to Vienna in the summer? Thalberg as well? Is he still coming to Leipzig as promised? Liszt as well? - What is Mrs. von Cibbini doing? Lickl, Vesque von Püttlingen, Fischhof?"

"Clara was sort of a modern woman in many ways, suffering the tension between her career and home life, because it was very important for her to keep playing concerts. On the other hand, she was [Robert] Schumann's wife and he wanted her around; he hated it when she traveled. But she was very much his great muse and inspiration, and virtually everything he wrote for the piano, Clara would have been the first to play."

"Miss Fanny Davies, who was studying with Madame Schumann at the same time as myself, is a very good example of easy muscular movement and finely developed finger technique. Leschetizky was a fine teacher; so was Liszt (when he took the trouble). L. Deppe and Caland were the last exponents of this perfectly simple and natural way of playing. For simple and natural it is, as is proved by the fact that all great concert pianists of today play in this way, whether they themselves realise it or not. (I was told that Backhaus, on being asked how he did it, replied that he didn't know.)"

"How much one has to do to leave town with a few dollars! ...I arrive home, dead tired, at 11 or 12 o'clock [at night], gulp a mouthful of water, lie down and think, "Is an artist much more than a beggar?" Yet, art is a beautiful gift. What, indeed, is more beautiful than to clothe one’s feelings in sound, what a comfort in sad hours, what a pleasure, what a wonderful feeling, to provide an hour of happiness to others. And what a sublime feeling to pursue art so that one gives one’s life for it."

"How do I produce the effects which I obtain from the piano? … In answer I would say I produce them by listening, criticizing, judging—working over the point, until I get it as I want it. Then I can reproduce it at will, if I want to make just the same effect; but sometimes I want to change and try another."

"Mr. Backhaus rarely used a percussive touch, and only for a special reason. One might listen to recital after recital without hearing a single unbeautiful tone."

"Backhaus was a wonderful pianist, not really representative of the German style. About him I can speak with real enthusiasm. He was more relaxed than most of them. I once heard him play the Chopin etudes and it was remarkable. In the first one in C major not a single note fell under the piano. It was fantastic. He heard me play Liszt's Feux follets and came up to me. “Horowitz,” he said, “I could never do that." But he was being nice. He could have if he wanted. I have often been asked what I consider the most difficult piece I have ever played. I can answer that quickly. It was Feux follets. The Liszt Don Juan is not an easy piece, either."

"Put the picture away or, preferably, send it back to me, dear Valentin. If people cannot understand it is based on their inner engagement with these matters, then there is no point in showing the thing at all."

"'Departure' [also the title of a famous triptych painting of Max Beckmann], yes departure from the illusion of life toward the essential things that wait behind appearance.. .We must insist that Departure is not bound to a political trend, but is symbolic for all times."

"Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions – what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows."

"I am working here [Amsterdam] on my last big triptych, which will be a tremendous story, and which gives me a more intense life and exhilaration. My God, life is worth living!"

"My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality in painting – to make the invisible visible through reality.. .What helps me most in this task is the penetration of space. 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. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality."

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

"It is not the subject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting. Therefore 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."

"All things come to me in black and white like virtue and crime. Yes, black and white are the two elements which concern me. It is my fortune, or misfortune, that I can see neither all in black nor all in white.. .I cannot help realizing both, for only in the two, only in black and white, can I see God as a unity creating again and again a great and eternally changing terrestrial drama."

"Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul.. .It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space. Something of this is perhaps contained in my pictures."

"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."

"Imagination is perhaps the most decisive characteristic of mankind. My dream is the imagination of space – to change the optical impression of the world of objects by a transcendental arithmetic progression of the inner being. That is the precept. In principal any alteration of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. Whether such alteration causes excitement or boredom in the spectator is for you to decide."

"The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality."

"Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul – thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to the real and political life. I assume, though, that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you [the audience] to decide which is the more important."

"Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work."

"My first informed impression, and what I would like to achieve, I can perhaps only realize when I am impelled as in a vision. One of my figures, perhaps one from the Temptation, sang his strange song to me one night – ..We are playing hide-and-seek, we are playing hide-and-seek across a thousand seas, we gods.. ..when the skies are red in the middle of the night, when the skies are red at night. You cannot see us, you cannot see us but you are ourselves.. ..that is what makes us laugh so gaily.. .Stars are our eyes and nebulae our beards.. ..we have people's souls for our hearts. We hide ourselves and you cannot see us, which is just what we want."

"One of my problems is to find the Ego, which has only one form and is immortal – to find it in animals and men, in the heaven and in the hell which together form the world in which we live."

"Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, [Beckmann lived and worked in the heart 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."

"All important things in art since Ur of the Chaldea's, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this Ego for which I am searching in my life and in my art. Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement, for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our Ego that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make."

"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."

"It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting."

"The Ego is the great veiled mystery of the world.. .I believe in it and in its eternal, immutable form. Its path is, in some strange and peculiar manner, our path. And for this reason I am immersed in the phenomenon of the Individual, the so-called whole Individual, and I try in every way to explain and present it. 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."

"And then I awoke and yet continued to dream… painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. I thought of my grand old friend Henri Rousseau [French Primitive painter, died in 1910] that Homer in the porter's lodge whose prehistoric dreams have sometimes brought me near the gods. I saluted him in my dream. Near him I saw William Blake, noble emanation of English genius.. .'Have confidence in your objects,' he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'.. .I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened. Peacefully I laid my head among the pillows... to sleep, and dream, again."

"If one perceives of it all – the entire War or even life as a whole – as a scene in the theater of 'infinity', many things are much easier to bear."

"Today I wanted to die of weakness and melancholy again."

"Afternoon with Q. [Quappi, his second wife] on foot, looking for butter and coals – in vain."

"Very worried and nerveux for 1944. Life is dark – as is death. Close 1943."

"Saw the English [pilots] coming from the sea in huge bands like the bristling hair of Zeus Jupiter. Heard all destroyed in Frankfurt. Sad... (12 April 1944)"

"At 10 o'clock a Dutch girl came by Lütjens: ! PEACE!"

"Well - not quite yet - green police [the Germans] still driving around with machine guns, etc. Nevertheless big peace party with warning by Eisenhower. - Walked around in the city [Amsterdam], much drunkenness.."

"Thick rumors of imminent peace are in the air.. .Big spectacle with six or seven British tanks. In the afternoon, they played war once more at the Palaisplein [near Dam square in Amsterdam center] and at the Rokin [street where Beckmann lived for 8 years, as 'entartete' German artist under German occupation; The Netherlands was liberated by the Allies, 5 May 1945]."

"The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another or sucking each other's blood. The entertaining folly of war evaporates, distinguished boredom sits down again on the dignified old overstuffed chairs.. .May I report about myself that I have had a truly grotesque time, brim-full with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs, hunger, and again and again work – in spite of everything [a. o. using his bed sheets as canvas for the new paintings]"

"Is there to be no getting away from this loathsome vegetative physicality?.. .Utter contempt for the lewd enticements that always lure us back into life's clutches. And when, half-parched, we seek to quench our thirst, the gods laugh us to scorn."

"Arrival at break of dawn. Veiled giants stood sleepily in wet mist on Manhattan.. .Yes, New York is really grandiose. But it stinks of burned fat, just like the sacrificial meal of the slain enemies among the savages. But nevertheless – crazy, crazy, crazy! Babylon is a kindergarten compared with this, and the tower of Babel here becomes the mass erection of a monstrous and senseless will. I am sympathetic."

"And the evening of the big Vanity Fair arrived.. . Perre Rathbone and innumerable people received me in enormous halls. The reporter shot pictures and Mrs. Beckmann [Quappi, his wife] grinned – - o-la-La.. ..The whole story is a monumental caprice of my situation in Germany before the Nazi's."

"Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it."