Max Ernst Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

A picture that I painted after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain [in 1936, Max Ernst was a resolute opponent of the Spanish dictator General Franco, who was supported by Germany's Nazi regime] is 'The Fireside Angel'. This is, of course, an ironic title for a rampaging beast that destroys and annihilates anything that gets in its way. This was my idea at the time of what would probably happen in the world, and I was right.

Max Ernst
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.

Max Ernst
Woman's nakedness is wiser than the teachings of the philosophers.

Max Ernst
Two artists can suggest two different subject matters and two completely different pictures by using the same spot. Every picture demonstrates certain aspects from the inner life of the painter who made it. For this reason, the orthodox Tachist is wary of letting himself be influenced by Leonardo's famous wall... I grant the painter the right to speak, to laugh, to take a stand and to draw upon all his hallucinatory faculties. But I absolutely refuse to live like a Tachist.

Max Ernst
What is a dream? You ask too much of me: it is a woman cutting down a tree. What are forests for? For making the matches one gives children to play with. Is the fire in the forest, then? The fire is in the forest. What do plants feed on? On mystery. What day is it today? Shit..

Max Ernst
I saw a shady forest and therein a crowd of nightingales. The nightingales as to their breast were rough and hairy, and as to their feet some were like calves, some like panthers, and some like wolves, and they had beast's claws instead of toes.

Max Ernst
The role of the painter... is to project that which sees itself in him.

Max Ernst
A painter may know what he doesn't want. But woe be to him if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself.

Max Ernst
Art has nothing to do with taste, art is not there to be 'tasted'. Yet a certain mayor believes that art exists to be 'judged', and the most modern art to be 'judged from a business point of view'. That such an original thought could emerge from a mayor's brain! What the mayor wants is exactly what the critics of the large and small dailies actually do. They set out to judge art. That is a very pleasant occupation, because no matter how wrong a judgment may be, you never have to revise it. The art judges talk about 'ability' and complain that the 'younger generation' has lost this ability. Sometimes their complaints are even seriously intended. But, gentlemen, do you really know what that is — ability? No, you don't.

Max Ernst
What is a forest? A marvelous insect. A drawing-board What do forests do? They never go to bed early. They are waiting for the tailor. What is the high season of the forests? It is the future..

Max Ernst
Max Ernst died the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time.

Max Ernst
The 2nd of April (1891) at 9:45 a. m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years.

Max Ernst
But it is of the past, it seems to me. Perhaps... Man and the nightingales were in the most favourable situation for imagining: for them the forest was a perfect dream-conductor..

Max Ernst
Studies in painting: Non. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist, and even the expression 'self-taught' is a phony, he thinks.

Max Ernst
A series of powers are at work within the great stream of Expressionism who have no outward similarity to one another but a common direction of thrust, namely the intention to give expression to things of the psyche [Seelisches] through form alone.

Max Ernst
Are there still forests over there? They are, apparently, wild and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, full of ant-hills, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent and kindly, without yesterdays or tomorrows. From one island to another, above the volcanoes, they play cards with inmatched packs. Naked, they are decked only in their majesty and their mystery.

Max Ernst
Looking at them [the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico, c. 1919] I had the sense of rediscovering something I had always known, just as when some event already seen opens up to us a whole realm of our own dream world, one that we have failed to see or comprehend, owing to a kind of censorship.

Max Ernst