"Genuine art just cannot be made effective through hurly-burly and propaganda in a journalistic sense. Everything essential happens apart from everyday noise, only to attain a more far-reaching effect. The weak and unoriginal try to obtain shabby fame for one day, and should get it. But this is not for us. One has to wait patiently for things to happen. - Most important is the silent show in your own rooms. By this, as time goes by, you will obtain a central force with which to direct everything, if you submerge yourself completely and consider the game of life as a contest for spiritual power - the only game which is really amusing. But this must happen almost in secret. Everything too public diminishes your strength - at least during the birth of the will and during its youth...Politics is a subaltern matter whose manifestation changes continually with the whims of the masses, just as cocottes manage to react according to the needs of the male and to transform and mask themselves. Which means - nothing essential. What it's all about is: the permanent, the unique, the true existence all through the flight of illusions, the retreat from the whirl of shadows. Perhaps we will succeed in this."
-"Herzlichst" Ihr Beckmann
(Max Beckmann, 194?)
