EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

For we are God

It's always thrilling to discover that yet another artist thinks alike. In 1927 the great German painter Max Beckmann published an article on the contemporary artist that covers many of the same ideas expressed here: the artist's vision inwards not outwards, a study and understanding of the Bible independent of preachers and, most notably, the desire through practice and purification to become God. Whether or not Beckmann thought that these were new ideas, he still believed that his goal was to overcome the compelling illusion that we are individuals living in a world of subject and objects, of self and all else, a world in which the peace and chaos inside us is projected into a false idea of an external heaven and hell. Here is some of what Beckmann wrote:

"The contemporary artist is the true creator of a world that did not exist before he gave shape to it… We no longer have anything to expect from without, only still from within. For we are God - by Jove, perhaps an altogether inadequate and pathetic God, but God all the same…Only by combating the weak, the egotistic, and so-called evil in ourselves, for the sake of universal love, will we succeed together as one humanity in achieving those great and decisive works; only then will we find the strength in ourselves to become God - that is, to be free, to decide for ourselves whether to live or die. Only then will we become the conscious masters of eternity - free from time and space."¹

These ideas, though, are so distant from conventional thinking about art that a Beckmann specialist recently described Beckmann's article as ambivalent with its "exaggerated claims to power and preposterousness." ²

 

1. Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, "After a while, one becomes preposterously indifferent to all this political gangsterism, until one is assuredly alone on the isle of one's soul." Between Self-certainty, Irony and Despair: Max Beckmann 1925-37" in Max Beckmann: Exile in Amsterdam (Munich: Pinakothek der Moderne) 2007, pp. 14-15

2. ibid., p. 15