Max Beckmann – Art & Theology

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

—Revelation 21:3–4

LOOK: God will wipe away every tear by Max Beckmann

Beckmann, Max_And God shall wipe away all tears (Stuttgart) — Max Beckmann (German, 1884–1950), *Apocalypse: God will wipe away every tear (Revelation XXI, 1-4)*, 1941–42. Lithograph with watercolor additions on paper, 15 3/8 × 11 13/16 in. (38.7 × 29.8 cm). Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany. [object record]

The German expressionist artist Max Beckmann created this poignant lithograph in 1941–42 while living in exile in Amsterdam, having been labeled a “degenerate artist” by the Nazi Party and stigmatized as “un-German.” It’s one of a series of twenty-seven lithographs he made on the book of Revelation. Titled Apokalypse, the series was commissioned by Georg Hartmann, owner of the Bauersche Gießerei (Bauer type foundry) in Frankfurt am Main, who privately printed it as a bound volume in 1943 in an edition of twenty-four. God will wipe away every tear is page 71. I’ve pictured here the edition in the collection of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, but there’s another one (with different hand-coloring) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

I learned about this piece from the fantastic book Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia by Natasha O’Hear and her father, Anthony O’Hear. Natasha describes and comments on it:

A winged figure is depicted by Beckmann dressed in a golden robe wiping away the tears from a squat, human figure lying on a table (who may be intended to be Beckmann himself). Through a circular window, which resembles a port hole and which is decorated with the colours of the rainbow, lies what one presumes to be the new Heaven and the new Earth (Rev. 21.1), here represented as just the river (sea?) of life and not a city. The fact that one has to gaze through the rainbow port hole to glimpse the New Jerusalem is fascinating and reminds one of Memling’s Apocalypse altarpiece of 1474–9, which depicts the heavenly throne room as existing in a circular rainbow resembling an eyeball. It has been argued that this visualization implies that the heavenly throne room (described in Rev. 4.3 as being enclosed in a rainbow) is akin to the all-seeing divine eye. Thus, in this image, if it is Memling who is being evoked here, the viewer, like John, is in the privileged position of seeing the future through the divine eye, as it were.

However, the theological intrigue plays second string to the central image, which would surely have resonated with viewers as somewhat strange, shocking even, in the 1940s. The concept of visualizing God/Christ himself wiping the tears from human eyes is not without artistic precedent, but it is rare. Giovanni di Paolo’s illustrated fifteenth-century antiphonal depicts ‘God wiping away the tears of the faithful,’ for example. [See also this historiated initial in the fourteenth-century Antiphonary of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas.] However, this is such an intimate image, and the divine figure (perhaps God/Christ or perhaps an angel) so human (apart from the wings, of course), that one cannot help being affected by the image. This New Jerusalem is a place of consolation built on relationships and not monumental landscapes. (231–32)

LISTEN: “God shall wipe away all tears,” from movement 13 of The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace by Karl Jenkins, 2000 | Performed by the Hjorthagens kammarkör (Hjorthagen Chamber Choir), dir. Karin Oldgren, 2021

God shall wipe away all tears
And there shall be no more death
Neither sorrow nor crying
Neither shall there be any more pain

Praise the Lord
Praise the Lord
Praise the Lord

This glorious piece of music is from the end of the final movement (“Better Is Peace”) of The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace by the Welsh composer and multi-instrumentalist Sir Karl Jenkins. Written for SATB choir, SATB soloists, muezzin, and a full orchestra with an enormous percussion section, the work was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, England, to commemorate the new millennium. Jenkins dedicated it to the victims of the Kosovo War between the Serbians and the ethnic Albanians, which lasted from February 1998 to June 1999.

It has been performed around the world over three thousand times and is one of Britian’s favorite pieces of contemporary classical music.

One of the primary genres in the Western choral tradition is the mass, which sets to music the five unchanging sections of the Roman Catholic liturgy: the Kyrie (“Lord, have mercy”), Gloria (“Glory to God in the highest”), Credo (“I believe”), Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy”), and Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”). Bach’s Mass in B minor and Mozart’s Requiem in D minor are among two of the most famous. Composer’s masses were originally sung in the church’s corporate worship, but now they’re mostly confined to concert settings and are often adapted—supplemented with other texts, and sometimes one or more of the traditional sections is eliminated.

Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man, named after the fifteenth-century French folk song “L’homme armé,” which opens the mass, comprises thirteen movements. Jenkins omits the Gloria and Credo but, in addition to the Kyrie, Sanctus (and Benedictus), and Agnus Dei, includes other religious texts and secular ones too: the Adhan (Islamic call to prayer); Psalms 56:1 and 59:2; poems or poetic extracts by Rudyard Kipling, John Dryden, Horace, Toge Sankichi (who survived the bombing of Hiroshima but died of radiation-induced cancer), Guy Wilson, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; a passage from the ancient Hindu epic the Mahabharata and from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; and Revelation 21:4.

For a movement-by-movement discussion of the mass, including all the lyrics, see the Choral Singer’s Companion entry by the musicologist Honey Meconi. And here you can listen to the work in full, as performed in 2018 in Berlin by a choir of two thousand people from thirty countries to mark the centennial of the end of the First World War:

The “God shall wipe away all tears” finale is markedly different from the two sections that precede it within the same movement. Movement 13 starts (at 58:26 of the Berlin video) with a vigorous and cheerful return of the “L’homme armé” melody, this time sung with a line from Mallory—voiced, in Mallory’s version of the Arthurian legends, by Lancelot and Guinevere:

Better is peace than always war,
And better is peace than evermore war,
And better and better is peace,
Better is peace than always war.

The melody’s original lyrics then return:

The armed man must be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man should arm himself
With an iron coat of mail.

But then the sprightly woodwinds play a Celtic dance–like interlude, leading into the choir’s “Ring, ring, ring, ring!” and a setting, with lush orchestral backing, of Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” This section is joyous and triumphant, and listeners might expect that final, emphatic “Ring!” to be the closer.

But it’s not.

The final section, a sort of coda, is quiet, slow, unaccompanied—no brass fanfare, no frolicsome woodwinds, no driving percussion, just human voices singing at a largo tempo a snippet from John the Revelator’s eschatological vision of a world without death, crying, and pain, having been healed by God for all eternity.

This is part two of a three-part series based on some of my art encounters at the Christians in the Visual Arts conference held June 13–16, 2019, at Bethel University. This post covers a handful of notable artworks I was introduced to through slides; part three will cover art I experienced in person through the conference’s exhibitions and auction. Read part one, about the Sacred Spaces tour of Minneapolis, here.

In his introductory remarks to the 2019 CIVA conference, Chris Larson cited Lauren Bon’s Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, the eponymous work of the Brooklyn Rail–curated exhibition running through November 24 at the church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti in Venice, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale. It’s a great rallying quote, one that I hadn’t heard before but that I can really get behind.

Bon, Lauren_Artists Need to Create — Lauren Bon (American, 1962–), *Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy*, 2006. Neon, edition 1 of 12. Photo: Joshua White, courtesy of the Metabolic Studio, Los Angeles.

The theme of the conference was “Are We There Yet,” a deliberately broad question which I took as referring to the conversation between serious art and serious faith, which CIVA has been heavily engaged in over its forty-year history. We talked about where “there” is and unpacked other aspects of the conference title, but I’m sidestepping those discussions to focus on the visual.

Wayne Roosa oriented our gathering by introducing us to two conceptual art projects by Simon Starling that offer opposing archetypes of the journey. The first, more aspirational one is Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2), which involved the movement of a wooden shed from one Swiss riverside location to another. “This journey of 8 km downstream from Schweizerhalle to the centre of Basel was undertaken through the temporary mutation of the shed into a boat. This boat, a copy of a traditional Weidling, was made only with wood from the shed and was subsequently used as a transport system for the remaining parts of the structure. The shed already included an oar of the type used on Weidlings nailed to its facade as decoration. In its new location, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the boat was then dismantled and once again re-configured into its original form, but for a few scars left over from its life as a boat, it stands just as it once did several kilometres up-stream” [source].

Starling, Simon_Shedboatshed — Simon Starling (British, 1967–), *Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2* (production still), 2005. Wooden shed, 390 × 600 × 340 cm.

“What I’m doing in a gallery situation,” says the artist, “is presenting a journey that I’ve been on, a process I’ve undertaken, and I’m asking for people to look at that in reverse. The circularity of many of the projects is a device to tell a story and it means that if you’re making a work about process, if you start and end in the same place, then somehow the journey becomes the important thing.” I think of lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from”—and further down, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

The second Starling work we considered was Autoxylopyrocycloboros, “a four-hour entropic voyage made across Loch Long [in Scotland] on a small wooden steamboat fuelled by wood cut piece-by-piece from its own hull.” This theatre of destruction ends with the boat’s debris floating—or sinking, as it were—in the water, Starling and his crewmate bobbing in their life vests somewhere out of frame. (The journey is presented in gallery settings as a series of thirty-eight color transparencies.) The title is an extrapolation of “ouroboros,” the mythical serpent who eats his own tail.

Starling, Simon_Autoxylopyrocycloboros — Simon Starling (British, 1967–), *Autoxylopyrocycloboros*, 2006. 38 color transparencies, 6 × 7 cm each.

Roosa suggested that as we navigate the waters, we can either self-destruct, eating ourselves alive, or we can deconstruct and then reconstruct. As an organization, we ought to be committed to the latter—taking apart the structure we started with and putting it back together.

+++

Over two and a half days of conference, there were several artists’ panels that brought to the fore some truly exciting work. I especially enjoyed hearing artists Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby, a married couple, discuss their different artistic media, styles, content choices, and creative processes, and the way their work interacts with the other’s. Both explore themes of family, faith, and African American heritage.

Sedrick Huckaby is a painter, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor known for his portraits. His earliest body of work is a series of impasto paintings of his maternal grandmother, Hallie Beatrice Welcome Carpenter (“Big Momma”), inside her old wood-framed house in Fort Worth, Texas. These are so tender—they show her resting, drinking coffee, reading her Bible, getting ready for church, talking with family. After Big Momma died, he continued making in absentia portraits of her by depicting accessories she wore or household spaces that bear her imprint—The Shoes She Wore, The Altar Dresser. Sedrick is now renovating Big Momma’s house to serve as a creative project space for the neighborhood.

Huckaby, Sedrick_Sitting in Her Room — Sedrick Huckaby (American, 1975–), *Sitting in Her Room*, 2008. Oil on canvas in rustic wood framework, 48 × 36 in.

Family has long been the primary subject of Sedrick’s art. I love the 2006 portrait he painted of his wife seated at the foot of their bed and holding their firstborn son, Rising Sun. Mother and child are surrounded by family quilts, made by aunts and grandmothers. The opening between the two wall-hanging quilts forms a square halo around Letitia’s head.