Zitat des Tages von Edvard Munch:
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.
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.
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
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.
Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.
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.
In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.
I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.
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.
Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.
I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.
It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.
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.
The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.
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.
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.
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
