Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by Max Ernst

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German artist Max Ernst.

Last updated on December 18, 2024.

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He is also noted for his novels consisting of collages.

German - Artist | April 2, 1891 - April 1, 1976

Source: Wikipedia

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Max Ernst

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Max Ernst

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

Max Ernst

Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.

Max Ernst

Art has got nothing to do with taste.

Max Ernst

Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

Max Ernst

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

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

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

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

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

Max Ernst

Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.

Max Ernst

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

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

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

Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back.

Max Ernst

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

Max Ernst

The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility.

Max Ernst