Painters From Germany

"I adore my life: it is filled with so much true poetry, fine feelings, things many have no idea about. I despise my life, which, being rich, allowed itself to be crammed into the confines of conventions. Between these two opinions pulsates my soul always longing for beauty and good."

"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."

"That [her lessons with Kandinsky] was a new artistic experience; Kandinsky was quite unlike the other teachers, and explained things thoroughly and penetratingly and regarded me as a human being with conscious aspirations, capable of setting myself targets to aim for. It was new to me and impressed me."

"We can only assert here, with especial satisfaction, that Gabriele Münters talent, robust, rooted in an inward strength and sensitivity, in fact genuinely German, should in no circumstances be assessed as masculin, or as 'quasi-masculine'. This talent – and we emphasize it, once more, with great satisfaction – can only be described as exclusively and purely feminine.. .Gabriele Münter doesn't paint feminine subjects, she does not work with feminine materials, and does not permit herself any feminine coquetry. Their are neither raptures, nor agreeable exterior elegance, nor appealing weaknesses to be found here."

"Nor, on the other hand, are there any masculine charms [in Gabriele Münter's work] either: no 'sinewy brushwork', no heaps of paint, 'hurled on to the canvas'. The pictures are painted throughout with a delicately and correctly sensed measure of external strength, with not a trace of feminine or masculine coquetry in the 'making'. We could almost say that they are painted modestly; i. e. that they were inspired, not by a desire for outward display, but by a purely inward compulsion."

"..we parted in 1914, when Kandinsky, being an enemy alien [because of his Russian nationality], had to flee from Germany to Switzerland, as did Jawlensky and Marianne de Werefkin too [to neutral Switzerland]. ..Ever since we parted in 1914, I have worked mainly by myself. After the First World War, here in Munich, we found that our Blue Rider group had broken up. Franz Marc and Macke had both been killed [in World War 1.] Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Marianne were no longer here; Bloch and Burliuk were in America. Those of us who were still in Munich remained friends, of course, but each one of us had learned to work by himself rather than in a group. Besides.. ..we had always been individualists and our Blue Rider group never had a style of its own as uniform as that of the Paris cubists."

"You [the interviewer Edouard Roditi, in 1958] have probably understood that I had always been mainly a plain-air painter, though I also painted portraits and still-life compositions. At first I experienced great difficulty with my brushwork – I mean with that the French call 'la touche de pinceau'. So Kandinsky taught me how to achieve the effects that I wanted with a palette knife. In the view from my window in Sèvres, that I painted in 1906, when we were together in France, you can see how well he taught me. Later of course, here in Murnau, I learned to handle brushes, too, but I managed this by following Kandinsky's example, first with a palette knife, than with brushes."

"My main difficulty was that I could not paint fast enough. My pictures are all moments of my life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of swimming. I mean that he taught me to work fast enough, and with enough self-assurance, to be able to achieve this kind of rapid and spontaneous recording of moments of life."

"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 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]."

"The laws of art are eternal and don't change at all, as the moral laws don't change in human beings."

"Our sketchbooks and studies – as well as the paintings and photos, convey the detail of our [Gabriele with Kandinsky, 1905] Tunisian impressions. At times we got along well – at times not at all – we took walks in the city and also in the Belvedere park – it was never boring with my beloved [ Kandinsky ], but we didn't made contact with any other people; he never wanted it."

"Well, when we [Kandinsky and Gabriéle Münter] first met, Munich was still very much a center of plein-air painting [painting in open air], and Kandinsky himself was a plain-air painter too, to some extent. We used to go out sketching and painting together in the countryside [around Murnau], and he painted a picture of me sketching, and I also did one of him [on board in oil]. That was a long time ago in 1903. It was only some ten years later, when he painted his first 'Improvisations' that he began to work exclusively in his studio."

"They [Jawlensky and Münter] often lived here in our Murnau house. But Paul Klee and Franz Marc were also close friends, and August Macke, too, whenever he was in Munich.. .Klee was never as active a theorist, in those years, as Kandinsky or Marianne de Werefkin. Besides, it took Klee much longer to become a truly and conscious modern artist.. .As you can see in my portrait of Klee, which is painted in 1913 – I mean the one where he is seen seated in one of the rooms here downstairs and wearing white summer slacks – he is not very communicative. That is why I depicted him all hunched up and tense, as if he were constraining some mainspring within himself. In my eyes, it was almost a portrait of silence rather than of Klee, and for many years it no longer occurred to me that he had been my model. But Klee was always a close friend of ours, and Kandinsky and I had great confidence in his talent and his future."

"Yes, we [ Marianne Werefkin and Gabriéle] shared very much the same tastes and ideas, when we lived together in this house (the so-called 'Russian house' in Murnau]. She was extremely perceptive and intelligent, but Jawlensky [living with Marianne Werefkin] didn't always approve 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' [famous Russian painter Ilya Repin ] and their common former teacher in Russia]. 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, a believer in a new kind of art of the future."

"In 1908, for instance, when I painted my 'Blue Mountain', I had learned the trick. It came to me as easily and naturally as song to a bird. After that, I worked more and more on my own. When Kandinsky became increasingly interested in abstract art, I also tried my hand, of course, at a few improvisations of the same general nature as his. But I believe I had developed a figurative style of my own, or at least one that suited my temperament, and I have remained faithful to it ever since, with occasional short holidays in the realm of abstraction."

"Suddenly I felt that my old dream was closer to coming true. You know that I dreamt of painting a big picture expressing joy, the happiness of life and the universe. Suddenly I feel the harmony of colors and forms that come from this world of joy."

"..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."

"I have now forgotten who was responsible for the original idea (the publication of the Almanac 'Der Blaue Reiter'], perhaps because I have never been particularly interested in theory.. .The 'Neue Künstlerverein' [in Münich] didn't approve of Kandinsky's ideas in 1911 and rejected his Composition No. 5. as too big for their show. So Kandinsky withdrew from the association, and Franz Marc, Kubín ], Le Fauconnier and I followed this lead. It was then that Kandinsky began to write the book that became 'Der Blaue Reiter'."

"But we had no contact with the painters of the Dachau and Worpswede School [where a. o. Paula Modersohn-Becker was settled as starting woman artist]. It was only much later, for instance, that we discovered that Hoelzel had already been experimenting with non-objective compositions as early as 1908. We [the Blaue Reiter artists] were only a group of friends who shared a common passion for painting as a form of self-expression."

"I think we were all more interested in being honest than in being modern. That's why there could be such great differences between the styles of the various members of our group.. .They had great faith in each other. I think that each of them knew that the other, as an artist, was absolutely honest. Whenever Kubín came to Munich from his nearby country retreat, they [Kandinsky and Kubin] spent many hours together, and I wish I had been able to take down in shorthand some of their conversations. Their ideas about art and life were so different."

"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."

"I was never interested in being just modern – I mean in creating a new style. I simply painted in whatever style seemed to suit me best. But Kandinsky was a thinker and had to express his ideas in words, so he constantly formulated new theories of art which he liked to discuss with Kubín, who was also a thinker.."

"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."

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

"Each of us [the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) artists] was interested in the work of the other members of our group, much as each of us was also interested in the health and happiness of the others. But we were still far from considering ourselves as a group or a school of art.. .I don't think we were ever as programmatic in out theories, as competitive or a self-assertive, as some of the modern [art] schools of Paris."

"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."

"Her Impressionistic paintings of 1906-07, painted with the palette-knife, do indeed have considerable similarities to Kandinsky's work of the same period, but the decisive artistic influence on her was Jawlensky."

"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.."

"The boundaries between the reflection and that which is reflected no longer exist: "art is life, life is art" said Wolf Vostell. Men's physical action, the handling of things is already considered to be art. What happens, the "happening", is already art if only one wants it to be and one affirms it. If art is life, life is art, the work of art no longer needs an envelope or frame. Art steps out of its frame, melts immediately into the life stream and only the subjective will of the individual tries to suggest or arrange that anything pertaining to this life stream becomes art, if one fixes it simply and one detaches it from its customary connections and relations."

"The spatial forms of TV sets were already used by Fluxus artists such as Wolf Vostell before the birth of video art. In his first TV De-coll/age, created in 1958, Vostell placed six television monitors in a wooden box behind a white canvas, which was slashed open with a knife. Tellingly, he declared the TV set to be "the sculpture of the twentieth century."... Rush concludes that both Vostell and Paik recontextualized the monitor, thus inaugurating a new way of viewing this small screen divorced from the familiar, commercial locus of the home..."

"I declare peace the greatest work of art."

"Events are weapons for politicization of art."

"Art is Life, Life is Art."

"Something is beautiful if it is honest. If you do an engaged piece of work, which is sincere, the concept of beauty meets the concept of truth. So no illusive harmony. I try to reach people who strive for truth, for identity. Although these conceptions are incredibly warn out, one must try to find the way back to these simple conceptions."

"Aber nicht das volle Format trifft den Betrachter, sondern das, was vielleicht ganz leise zu ihm spricht. Das, was einflüsternd zu Ihnen vorstößt, was etwas in Ihnen freilegt an Energien, an die Sie schon gar nicht mehr geglaubt haben"

"He was best known for his populous, elaborately theatrical “Cafe Deutschland” paintings. Begun in the late 1970s, these were part political cartoon, part history painting, part memoir. They lampooned the paradoxes of West German society by depicting disparate casts of characters in skewed cabaret settings. Their rubbery forms and figures might include the German eagle, Stalin or Hitler, as well as friends and other artists. These were the first works that Mr. Immendorff exhibited in New York in the early 1980s at the Sonnabend Gallery, then in SoHo."

"I am for a form of art, that sees itself as one of the many means through which human society can be changed."

"Jörg Immendorff was one of the most divisive artists in the post-war German art scene, as his paintings could not be approached in a classical, art-loving, aestheticising manner, or classified into art historical categories; moreover his subjects and the solutions in his pictures are unsettling to some people, even today. At the same time, he was one of the most “typical” West German painters of his day, not only because he focused on obviously German (political) matters in his works, but also because he took earlier German painting traditions – the visual world of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – and progressed forward with them, enriching them with bold innovations. His characteristic tumultuous, exultantly coloured, constantly moving imagery and compositions were arrived at step by step."

"I don't want my image to appear in the mass media, since it would detract from the project."

"Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century."

"In his 60 years of critiquing waste, commercialization, environmental exploitation, and social injustice, he has employed trash, old newspapers, liquid crystals, and industrial materials, and he has even painted with acid. Since Metzger is known for his work’s philosophical dimension, sometimes penning essays related to his art’s themes."

"What is the significance of viewer participation in your work? It has to do with kinetic art. Kinetic art has very much to do with the interaction between spectator and art. In the second half of the ’50s, this became a big international movement. When I moved from painting to connections within media, this came through in the first work, which was an exhibition of found cardboard pieces. It was a turning point for me. The world itself, the industrial fabricated world, could stand for the man-made world of art."

"Facing up to the Nazis and the powers of the Nazi state coloured my life as an artist."

"At the beginning I was confronted with a choice: move into art or revolutionary politics,... I took the path of art at the age of 18.... I could see this possibility of using the ideas of social change within art."

"Auto-destructive art is conceived as a desperate last-minute subversive political weapon used by artists. It is an attack on the Capitalist system and the production of war materials. It is committed to nuclear disarmament and people's struggle."

"In studying the problem of the painting of Christ's figure, I found it to be the painting of the great problem of life. To me He was the bringer of light to the darkness of the world. Many of the French artists wished to find the light in Nature. I wished to find the light within the figure that I was presenting. In Christ I grasped the embodiment of the outward and the inward light. I wished to bring things out of the darkness, as Rembrandt found all things through light."

"Before commencing this work I had begun to realize how children follow the Spirit."

"The one whom I honor most of all is Rembrandt. Rubens and Velasquez painted better than Rembrandt, but he was the greatest of all painters because he was most powerful humanly. His grasp of all things was from within out. He had something that surpassed all other painters-a great humanity. He is perhaps the only one who could have painted the Christ."

"Rather than just a depiction of nature, I searched for something like soul. I was occupied with painting children, studying them was more rewarding to me than studying adults at that time. I also wanted to give more to the children."