Expressionism Quotes

“Like many others of the younger generation, for Magda and Fritz the last years of the sixties were the utopian meaning of paradise on earth, the more so for Magda who had graduated with honours. She had based a part of her thesis on the philosophical perspective of the Expressionist movement, particularly what the philosopher Nietzsche wrote in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which, amongst other things, he stated: ''What does my shadow matter?... Let it run after me!... I shall out-run it...'' And that's what Magda wanted to do with her life: declare herself independent from conventional thought and from past memories.”
― Anton Sammut, Memories of Recurrent Echoes

“Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs,
senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly?”
― August Strindberg, The Father

“I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.”
― Mark Rothko

“Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.”
― Max Beckmann

“Art is not about beauty, art is an expression.”
― Vikram Roy, The Alchemist A Mystery in Three Acts

“Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.”
― Hermann Bahr

“The difference between writers and readers is similar to the difference between expressionism and impressionism. Writers want to express themselves and readers want to be impressed.”
― Claire Amber

“A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.”
― Robert Kolker, Film form and Culture

“The interest shown at the beginning of the twentieth century in Parisian and Burgundian court illumination, which seemed the most perfect and significant aspect of this technique, had led historians to neglect northern productions, which seemed somewhat heavy, even rustic, by comparison with the former. Modern sensibility, influenced by expressionist traditions which western countries are beginning to appreciate, is allowing us a better understanding of the true quality of this art. The crudeness is due in part to economic problems: the absence of wealthy patronage and the need for cheapness. But it was also a matter of principle, of preferring the spontaneity of a gesture, the immediacy of an expressive form, to exactness and miniature description.”
― Albert Châtelet

“Toward the middle of the fifteenth century a sizable group of German painters and printmakers reacted against the lingering influence of the so-called international or soft style--supple in form and idyllic in temperament--and adopted a new, sometimes brutal realism. In a few cases, as with Konrad Witz, the new style took the form of an unprecedented concern with presenting solid, blocky figures in simple, well-defined spaces. In the work of other artists such as the Master of the Karlsruhe Passion, the Master of the Erfurt Regler Altar, and Hans Multscher, the new style was characterized by expressionistic tendencies: intentional coarseness of form and ugly, uncouth and often dwarflike figure types.”
― Alan Shestack, Fifteenth Century Engravings of Northern Europe from the National Gallery of Art

“Picasso’s eclecticism signifies the deliberate destruction of the unity of the personality; his imitations are protests against the cult of originality; his deformation of reality, which is always clothing itself in new forms, in order the more forcibly to demonstrate their arbitrariness, is intended, above all, to confirm the thesis that ‘nature and art are two entirely dissimilar phenomena’. Picasso turns himself into a conjurer, a juggler, a parodist, out of opposition to the romantic with his ‘inner voice’, his ‘take it or leave it’, his self-esteem and self-worship. And he disavows not only romanticism, but even the Renaissance, which, with its concept of genius and its idea of the unity of work and style, anticipates romanticism to some extent. He represents a complete break with individualism and subjectivism, the absolute denial of art as the expression of an unmistakable personality. His works are notes and commentaries on reality; they make no claim to be regarded as a picture of a world and a totality, as a synthesis and epitome of existence. Picasso compromises the artistic means of expression by his indiscriminate use of the different artistic styles just as thoroughly and wilfully as do the surrealists by their renunciation of traditional forms.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Die Städter (1914)

Dicht wie Löcher eines Siebes stehn
Fenster beieinander, drängend fassen
Häuser sich so dicht an, daß die Straßen
Grau geschwollen wie Gewürgte stehn.

Ineinander dicht hineingehakt
Sitzen in den Trams die zwei Fassaden
Leute, wo die Blicke eng ausladen
Und Begierde ineinander ragt.

Unsre Wände sind so dünn wie Haut,
Daß ein jeder teilnimmt, wenn ich weine.
Flüstern dringt hinüber wie Gegröhle:

Und wie stumm in abgeschlossner Höhle
Unberührt und ungeschaut
Steht doch jeder fern und fühlt: alleine.”
― Alfred Wolfenstein, Die gottlosen Jahre [microform]