German Artist Quotes

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

Käthe Kollwitz

I love color. It must submit to me. And I love art. I kneel before it, and it must become mine. Everything around me glows with passion. Every day reveals a new red flower, glowing, scarlet red. Everyone around me carries them. Some wear them quietly hidden in their hearts. And they are like poppies just opening, of which one can see only here and there a hint of red petal peeking out from the green bud.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

The political topicality of my October paintings means almost nothing to me, but in many reviews it is the first or only thing that arouses interest, and the response to the pictures varies according to current political circumstance. I find this rather a distraction.

Gerhard Richter

The essence of art can never change. I'm convinced you can't talk about art. At best, you will have a translation, a poetic paraphrase, & as for that I'll leave that to the poets.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

There is no communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can ask no question, and he makes no statement; he offers no information, and his work cannot be used. It is the end product which counts.

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.

Jörg Immendorff

There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.

In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power.

What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

The picture is a self-sufficient work of art. It is not connected to anything outside.

Kurt Schwitters

We desire to achieve to the socialist republic not only the recovery of the conditions of art, but also the beginning of a unified artistic area for our time.

Art is something given, not reproduced... the painter paints what he sees with his innermost senses, the expression of his being.. every other impression becomes, for him, an inner expression.

Herwarth Walden

Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

Cry, Art, cry and lament loudly, nobody nowadays wants you.

He [Otto Mueller] himself omitted certain things in his pictures that his contemporaries deemed to be of importance, in order to capture the essence.... with the greatest possible simplicity.

The past is the strongest network we have, but the future is a much stronger one.

Sebastian Bieniek

A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.

John Heartfield

The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams.

It's the procedures in and for themselves that interest me. The picture isn't really necessary.

A toothache, not to be perverse, Is an unmitigated curse...