Douglas Sirk Art Quotations

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

Now in theory, if there is no straight line in the universe, this has its effect on art. Art must consist of something bent, something curved.