German Artist Quotes

Günter Grass

Max Ernst

Paul Klee

Caspar David Friedrich

Leni Riefenstahl

George Grosz

Franz Marc

White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

The people itself (and I do not mean the 'masses') has always given art its essential style. The artist merely clarifies and fulfills 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.

Where I used to strive for movement and restlessness I now attempt to sense and express the complete total calm of objects and the surrounding air.

Lyonel Feininger

When intuition joins exact research, the progress of understanding will be accelerated astoundingly.

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.

Caspar David Friedrich

Religion without art is a dead system of dogmas which have no effect on life.

Anagarika Govinda

It was the desire for living, vital expression.... which built Gothic cathedrals, which created Mozart sonatas. I believe it is going to stay that way for long time to come.

For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means.

And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment.

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

Leni Riefenstahl

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos — and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them — that is interesting.

I don't make fun of a face. I make fun of what is behind that face.

I want to take retirement rather than feel as if it's taking me unawares. Maybe even seize it joyously. But at least behold it without looking back so longingly that I turn into a pillar of regret.

Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life. Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master of one's craft and able to create. Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being

Helmut Gernsheim

I'd like to briefly state the accomplishment that we expect from a photographer. He must make the person being photographed forget that he has eaten from the tree of knowledge.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Infinitesimal is the nearest to zero infinitesimal is so small that it is no longer something but it is not yet nothing.

All the technique you can learn - and you should learn everything you can - you should have it here in the fingers not here in the head - and then you forget about it.

Another difficult thing that I experience is when after such a year of activity I have to empty my studio – completely. And I have found that this part only gets harder. You might think it gets easier, but I really just find it gets harder.

Why have our standards fallen so low? Why do we have all these ugly things which nobody needs? Industrial manufacture and new materials have led to truly unlimited possibilities of forms. There are no longer any natural constraints which depend on materials such as wood and stone. We simply manufacture everything that is technically possible and lack new structures on which to base our decisions.

Sculpture is the essence of things, the essence of nature, that which is perpetually human.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck

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.

Stefan Szczesny

Mixed feelings when he [Max Ernst frequently writes about himself in the third person] enters the forest for the first time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke of as 'being at one with Nature'. Wonderful joy in breathing freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and trapped.

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.

Money has to undergo a metamorphosis again, it has to relinquish its role in the market economy and engage in an economy of capacities. Then we would be concerned with human creative productivity. And we would come full circle, since each human being can then act within his company as co-creator of the future, can - in full dignity - contribute to shaping this future.