“My goal is always to express emotion and experience... My paintings are allegories, not illustrations.”— Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
“I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it.”— Willem de Kooning
“We will no longer paint a forest or a horse as we have been accustomed to see it, but as it is in reality, as the forest or the horse feels itself, its absolute essence, which lives behind the appearance we see.”— Franz Marc