Beck on Max Beckmann
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“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.”
“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.”
“Even our own cadaver-bones shall not hinder us from standing our ground until the very last, proud and tired in the face of the black wall that surrounds us.”
“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..”
“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.”
“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.”
“The metaphysics of substance. The strange feeling which comes over us when we sense: this is skin – this is bone – all in a single vision that is completely unearthly. The dreaminess of our existence mixed at the same time with the indescribably sweet illusion of reality.”
“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.”
“My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesque in life. An art that can always be directly present to us when life is at its most real.. [ on the same day he noted:] ..Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia England France against Germany. We agreed that it would be no bad thing for our rather demoralized present-day civilization if everyone's instincts and drives were to be harnessed to one cause..”
“A human face, a hand, a woman's breast or a manly body, an expression of conflicting joy and pain, the infinite ocean, savage crags, the melancholy speech of black trees against the snow, the fierce power of spring blossoms and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer noon when our old friend Pan is asleep and the ghost of noon are murmuring – all this is enough to make us forget the sorrows of the world, or to give them form. In any case the determination to give form to things brings with it part of the solution for which you are seeking. The path is hard and the goal can never be reached – but it is a path.”