What I am chiefly concerned with in my paintings is the ideality that lies concealed behind surface reality. I seek, in the here and now, a bridge to the invisible: as a well-known cabalist once said, "If you wish to attain the invisible, you must penetrate the visible to the uttermost." It is my constant aim to comprehend the magic of reality and transmute that reality into painting. Paradoxical as it may sound, itis reality that constitutes the true mystery of existence.

My chief help in this is the exploration' of space. Height, breadth and depth must be brought on to the canvas in such a way that the picture surface forms an abstraction of space, a protection against infinitude.

My figures come and go as good or ill fortune dictates; they, develop in what seems to be an accidental way, but it is my task to give them permanent shape. What I seek to discover is the unique, immortal Self that lives in persons and animals, in the heaven and hell that make; up the world we live i

Space and again space --the everlasting divinity that, surrounds us and in which we, have our being --this is what I, seek to express in painting. The painter's task, from which I personally cannot escape, is quite different from that of the poet or the musician. Whatever intellectual, metaphysical, this worldly or other- worldly events may occur in my life, it, is only in painting that I can record them. What matters is not the object itself but its transposition, by means of painting, into the abstraction of a two-dimensional surface' I scarcely need immaterial things, for the object itself is sufficiently unreal until painting has given it objectivity.

--Max Beckmann