Paula Modersohn-Becker Quotes

• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Art, Flower, Passion

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• In art one is usually totally alone with oneself.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Art, Oneself

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Beautiful, Struggle, Thinking

  Paula Modersohn-Becker, Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey (1998). “Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals”, p.182, Northwestern University Press

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Flower, Hair, Hands

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

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Expression, Giving, Feelings

  Diary entry in 1898. "Painting in the Twentieth Century, an Analysis of the Artists and Their Work". Book by Werner Haftmann, p. 82, 1966.

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

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Color, Giving, Trying

  "Art of the 20th Century". Book by Ingo F. Walther, Part 1, p. 49, 2000.

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Beautiful, Flower, Hair

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• 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?

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Lonely, Eye, Essence

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  People, Faces, Speak

  Paula Modersohn-Becker, Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey (1998). “Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals”, p.121, Northwestern University Press

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Believe, Thinking, Feelings

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

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Money, Wings, Poverty

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Expression, Paris, Drawing

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Art, Past, Thinking

  "Expressionism". Book by Norbert Wolf and Uta Grosenick, p. 74, 2004.

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Powerful, Men, Tree

  Paula Modersohn-Becker, Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey (1998). “Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals”, p.80, Northwestern University Press

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• 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.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker

  Sweet, Rain, Biblical

  Paula Modersohn-Becker, Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey (1998). “Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals”, p.157, Northwestern University Press

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