Expressionism Quotes

“No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.”

“We send our fondest greetings to all those artists who have heard the call and feel responsible - Cubists, Futurists, and Expressionists. Join us!”

“The striving for the supernatural appeared to be the reverse side of radical socialism, the expression of a psychosis awakened through war and revolution.”

“If we look at the Expressionism exasperate the expressiveness of the image almost want to tell us not to accept this limit, creating "a scream" as if they say it can not be all here.”

“Expressionism is not a style but rather an attitude toward life. It is a way of viewing consciousness, rather than ideas, a way of viewing the universe of which the earth is only a part.”

“Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.”

“We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces.”

“It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.”

“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.”

“Only today can art be metaphysical, and it will continue to be so. Art will free itself from the needs and desires of men. We will no longer paint a forest or a horse as we please or as they seem to us, but as they really are.”

“I begin with movement.. .I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement.. (Kirchner returned for a short stay to Berlin in 1925 and picked up again his favorite motif of women and men, walking in the city-streets]”

“They [his 'Street Scene' paintings and drawings of Berlin] originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.”

“Recently I have felt just what the mood of colors means to me: it means that everything in this picture changes its local color according to the same principle and that thereby all muted tones blend in a unified relationship , one to the other [during a stay in Paris]”

“..how the movement of the passers-by [in his 'Street scene' painting of 1913] is comprehended in the rhombus of the heads which is twice repeated. In this way life and movement arise from an original geometric form. [a diagram is drawn by Kirchner together with this text-line]”

“[proclaiming the destruction of the old order and the rising of a new order in the aftermath of destruction:] We want to pour oil onto the fire - fan the tiny glow into flame - span the earth - make it quiver - and beat more fiercely - living and pulsating cosmos - steaming universe.”

“To do this, to show the toiling proletarian, I was reduced to the simplest forms, to reproducing simple, organic things that could he comprehended in their natural, their human and their social context.. .The violence of the situation permitted the forceful character of the woodcut.”

“I am trying to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air – trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.”

“Art today is moving in directions of which our forebears had no inkling; the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are heard galloping through the air; artistic excitement can be felt all over Europe – new artists are signalling to one another from all sides; a glance, a touch of the hand, is enough to convey understanding.”

“I felt it necessary to evolve entirely new concepts (of form and space and paintings) and postulate them in an instrument that could continue to shake itself free from dialectical perversions. The dominant ones, Cubism and Expressionism, only reflected the attitudes of power or spiritual debasement of the individual.”

“..the rejection of impressionistic copies of nature and a move towards sensing the content, abstraction, – expressing the extract.. [describing her leading idea, for the period she worked side by side in open air with Kandinsky, around the village Murnau, circa 1909]”