Creativity Quote by Max Beckmann

Beckmann doesn’t invoke God as comfort; he replaces God with a condition: space, impersonal and total, the one “infinite deity” you can’t pray away. Coming from an artist who lived through two world wars, exile, and the churn of modernity, the line reads less like mystical uplift and more like an aesthetic survival strategy. When history proves that institutions, nations, even moral certainties can collapse overnight, “space” becomes the only reliable constant: it surrounds, it contains, it doesn’t negotiate.

The phrasing is doing quiet double work. “Space, and space again” sounds like a painter’s mantra, the studio equivalent of breathing exercises. It’s also insistence, as if he’s correcting a worldview that wants to make humans the center. Beckmann’s art is famously crowded with bodies, masks, interiors that feel too tight. Naming space as deity reframes that claustrophobia: the press of figures isn’t just social or psychological, it’s metaphysical. We’re not trapped in rooms; we’re embedded in an endless field.

The subtext is about scale and humility, but not the gentle kind. “In which we are ourselves contained” denies the romantic fantasy of transcendence. You don’t rise above the world; you’re held by it. For an artist, that’s also a statement about form: composition isn’t decoration, it’s ontology. Space isn’t background. It’s the power that defines what can exist, where, and for how long.