Expressionism Quotes

Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism. ~ Hermann Bahr

Reggae, oh man. It's the ultimate music. The positivity. The musicality. The whole cultural expressionism of it. The danceability. Just the cool factor. The melody factor. Some of it comes from a religious place. If there were a competition of who makes the best religious music, it would definitely be the Rastafarian reggae. ~ Lupe Fiasco

Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! ~ LeRoy Neiman

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am. ~ Susan Sontag

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades ... It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop ... ~ Robert Indiana

Art is not about beauty, art is an expression. ~ Vikram Roy

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. ~ Jackson Pollock

Sometimes the things I learn making paintings or drawings - composition, colour, expressionism, texture - can directly influence the making of a film. Sometimes it's great that they are different, and simply taking a break from one medium to spend time with another, recharges the batteries and I feel refreshed. ~ Dave McKean

The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks. ~ Joni Mitchell

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. ~ Romare Bearden

If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it. ~ Tobin Bell

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. ~ Mark Rothko

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs,
senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly? ~ August Strindberg

...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong. ~ Peter Watson

I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own. ~ Jackson Pollock

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman. ~ Donald Judd

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness. In fact, he creates new appearances of things. ~ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. ~ Aaron Huey

Since adolescence I've had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It's that German thread of the metaphysic - they were looking for the beyond in dreams. ~ Dumitru Tepeneag

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. ~ Henry Flynt

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. ~ Max Ernst

Romance writing is a passion and the art of expressionism through the written word is a love affair... Anyone who tells you differently has never immersed themselves into something so mentally, physically and spiritually draining and rewarding in their lives as it is to write a book. It is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time and possibly one of the most rewarding things in the world next to parenting. ~ Julie Garver