Paula Modersohn-Becker Quotes

The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I'm there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli's sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply told, often so glorious in their colors.

I love color. It must submit to me. And I love art. I kneel before it, and it must become mine. Everything around me glows with passion. Every day reveals a new red flower, glowing, scarlet red. Everyone around me carries them. Some wear them quietly hidden in their hearts. And they are like poppies just opening, of which one can see only here and there a hint of red petal peeking out from the green bud.

In art one is usually totally alone with oneself.

It is my experience that marriage does not make one happier. It destroys the illusion that has been the essence of one's previous existence, that there existed something like a soul-mate. The feeling of not being understood is heightened in marriage by the fact that one's entire life beforehand had the aim of finding a being who would understand one. But isn't it better to exist without such an illusion and look this great lonely truth straight in the eye?

I think the time is coming for struggle and uncertainty. It comes into every serious and beautiful life. I knew all along that it had to come.

I know I shall not live very long... If I've painted three good pictures, then I shall leave gladly with flowers in my hand and my hair.

How happy I would be if I could give figurative expression to the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly within me.

I know I shall not live very long. But why is that so sad? Is a festival more beautiful because it lasts longer? My sensuous perceptions grow sharper, as if I were supposed to take in everything with the few years that will be offered to me ... And now love will still blossom for me before I depart, and if I've painted three good pictures, then I shall leave gladly with flowers in my hand and my hair.

I must learn to express the gentle vibration of things: the intrinsically rough texture. I must find this expression in drawings; in the way in which I draw my nudes here in Paris, more original and at the same time sensitively observed.

Nature is supposed to become greater to me than people. It ought to speak louder from me. I should feel small in the face of nature's enormity.

I believe that one should not think too much about nature when painting, at least not during the painting's conception. The colour sketch should be made exactly as one has perceived things in nature. But personal feeling is the main thing.

Lack of money rivets us firmly to the ground, one's wings are clipped.

I want to give colors intoxication, fullness, excitement, power by trying to forget Impressionism.

We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside.

Worpswede, Worpswede, I cannot get you out of my mind... Your magnificent pine trees! I call them my men--thick, gnarled, powerful, and tall--yet with the most delicate nerves and fibers in them.