Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quotes

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.

People become artists out of despair.

It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.

If suffering can be transformed into creativity . . . I want to try it.

Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us.

I begin with movement... I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement..

All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds.

Every day I studied the nude, and movement in the streets and in the shops [in Berlin]. Out of the naturalistic surface with all its variations I wanted to derive the pictorially determined surface.

They [his 'Street Scene' paintings and drawings,he made in Berlin] originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.

The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting (remark on printmaking).

You can do anything. Nothing is forbidden.