Max Ernst famous quotes

05-20-2025

Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.
-- Max Ernst

#Reality #Two #Noble
Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.
-- Max Ernst

#Artist #Light #Matter
Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.
-- Max Ernst

#Creativity #Reality #Sparks
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted
-- Max Ernst

#Art #Taste #Art Is
My paintings are not meant to be tasted.
-- Max Ernst

#Painting #Meant To Be
All good ideas arrive by chance.
-- Max Ernst

#Ideas #Intuition #Chance
Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness.
-- Max Ernst

#Art #Men #Mirrors
The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.
-- Max Ernst

#Roles #Projects #Painter
I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works.
-- Max Ernst

#Birth
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.
-- Max Ernst

#Reflection #Artist #Achievement
And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us...
-- Max Ernst

#Bird #Flesh
Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.
-- Max Ernst

#Able #Records #Possibility
The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.
-- Max Ernst

#Artist #Phases #Development
Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back.
-- Max Ernst

#Water
I have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the painting itself that should be beautiful.
-- Max Ernst

#Beautiful #Art #Ugly
Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.
-- Max Ernst

#Beauty #Teaching #Philosopher
Art has got nothing to do with taste.
-- Max Ernst

#Art #Taste
The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility.
-- Max Ernst

#Christian #Humility #Pride
Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
-- Max Ernst

#Reality #Discovery #Amusement
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

#Expression #Giving #Common

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