One Of My Problems Is To Find

As A Painter, Cursed Or Blessed With A Terrible And Vital Sensuousness, I Must Look For Wisdom With My Eyes. I Repeat, With My Eyes, For Nothing Could Be More Ridiculous Or Irrelevant Than A 'philosophical Conception Painted Purely Intellectually Without The Terrible Fury Of The Senses Grasping Each Visible Form Of Beauty And Ugliness.

What Matters Is Real Love For Things Of The World Outside Us And For The Deep Secrets Within Us.

The World Is Rather Shot To Pieces [end Of World War Ii - 1945], But The Spectators Climb Out Of Their Caves And Pretend To Have Again Become Normal And Customary Humans Who Ask Each Other's Pardon Instead Of Eating One Another Or Sucking Each Other's Blood. The Entertaining Folly Of War Evaporates, Distinguished Boredom Sits Down Again On The Dignified Old Overstuffed Chairs.. .may I Report About Myself That I Have Had A Truly Grotesque Time, Brim-full With Work, Nazi Persecutions, Bombs, Hunger, And Again And Again Work - In Spite Of Everything [a. O. Using His Bed Sheets As Canvas For The New Paintings].

My Figures Come And Go, Suggested By Fortune Or Misfortune. I Try To Fix Them Divested Of Their Apparent Accidental Quality.

Often, Very Often, I Am Alone. My Studio In Amsterdam, (beckmann Lived In The Center Of Amsterdam During World War 2.) An Enormous Old Tobacco Storeroom Is Again Filled In My Imagination With Figures From The Old Days And From The New, Like An Ocean Moved By Storm And Sun And Always Present In My Thoughts. Then Shapes Become Beings And Seem Comprehensible To Me In The Great Void And Uncertainty Of The Space Which I Call God.