Max Ernst Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

Art has got nothing to do with taste.

And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us.

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

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

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.

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.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

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.

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

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.

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.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted