Art Is Creative For The Sake Of

My Heart Beats More For A Raw, Average Vulgar Art, Which Doesn't Live Between Sleepy Fairy-tale Moods And Poetry But Rather Concedes A Direct Entrance To The Fearful, Commonplace, Splendid And The Average Grotesque Banality In Life.

Colour, As The Strange And Magnificent Expression Of The Inscrutable Spectrum Of Eternity, Is Beautiful And Important To Me As A Painter; I Use It To Enrich The Canvas And To Probe More Deeply Into The Object. Colour Also Decided, To A Certain Extent, My Spiritual Outlook, But It Is Subordinated To Life, And Above All, To The Treatment Of Form. Too Much Emphasis On Colour At The Expense Of Form And Space Would Make A Double Manifestation Of Itself On The Canvas, And This Would Verge On Craft Work.

I Think Only Of Objects: Of A Leg Or An Arm, Of The Wonderful Sense Of Foreshortening, Breaking Through The Plane, Of The Division Of Space, Of The Combination Of Straight Lines In Relation To Curved Ones.

The World Is Rather Shot To Pieces [end Of World War Ii - 1945], But The Spectators Climb Out Of Their Caves And Pretend To Have Again Become Normal And Customary Humans Who Ask Each Other's Pardon Instead Of Eating One Another Or Sucking Each Other's Blood. The Entertaining Folly Of War Evaporates, Distinguished Boredom Sits Down Again On The Dignified Old Overstuffed Chairs.. .may I Report About Myself That I Have Had A Truly Grotesque Time, Brim-full With Work, Nazi Persecutions, Bombs, Hunger, And Again And Again Work - In Spite Of Everything [a. O. Using His Bed Sheets As Canvas For The New Paintings].

As A Painter, Cursed Or Blessed With A Terrible And Vital Sensuousness, I Must Look For Wisdom With My Eyes. I Repeat, With My Eyes, For Nothing Could Be More Ridiculous Or Irrelevant Than A 'philosophical Conception Painted Purely Intellectually Without The Terrible Fury Of The Senses Grasping Each Visible Form Of Beauty And Ugliness.