24 Quotes by Edvard Munch
- The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.
- Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
- One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.
- Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
- Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.
- The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.
- This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
- To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.
- When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
- Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.
- No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
- Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.
- From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
- A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
- Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.
- I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.
- For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.
- Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
- I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.
- I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
- I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
- In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.
- In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.
- It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.
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