The Painter as Prophet
Daniel Crews- Chubb, Timothy Taylor Exhibit . FRIEZE LONDON 2025.
The Painter as Prophet: Nietzsche, Zarathustra, and the Arrogance of Creation
For a many years in my 20s, I spent long hours on trains — the kind of long, repetitive journeys that invite reflection, or perhaps a kind of drifting thought that isn’t quite reflection at all. I often carried the same book: a battered old print of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I read it, consumed it, turned its pages again and again, yet finished each journey without any real understanding of what I had read. I felt moved, disturbed, compelled — but I couldn’t have said why. It was like standing before a painting that seems to know something you don’t. I suspect that experiencing art is like that: we recognise meaning before we can articulate it, and often never fully manage to. The inexplicable isn’t a barrier to understanding; it is where understanding begins.
The longer I lived with Zarathustra, the more I came to realise that its meaning lies not in what it argues but in how it speaks. The book is a poem disguised as philosophy — a work of vision rather than logic. Its prophetic voice, its riddles and parables, operate not to explain the world but to remake it. Nietzsche’s language is bombastic, assured, and deliberately arrogant, because he is attempting to speak from beyond the boundaries of convention. Zarathustra is not philosophy in the classroom sense; it is the performance of philosophy as art. In its excesses, one can see the same impulse that drives painting when it steps beyond description and begins to assert its own truth.
The Inexplicable as Artistic Condition
In both art and philosophy, what moves us most is rarely what we can fully explain. The inexplicable — that moment of shock, recognition, or awe — is not the enemy of reason but its source. To create something new, whether in words or paint, is to step beyond what reason can map.
Nietzsche’s prophetic mode does this through language that borders on delirium; painting does it through form that borders on abstraction. In both, meaning arises through intensity, not explanation.
Nietzsche understood that to create new values one must use a new tongue — a poetic one. Zarathustra speaks in images and aphorisms rather than arguments. It paints with words, much as a painter thinks in colour. Each pronouncement is a stroke, an assertion that the world can be seen otherwise. When Nietzsche writes, “One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star,” he could be describing the painter’s condition as easily as the philosopher’s.¹ Creation begins in disorder; art emerges from the refusal to tidy it too soon.
The Arrogance of Creation
There is an inevitable arrogance in the act of making something new. Innovation, by definition, implies the inadequacy of what came before. Nietzsche embraces that arrogance, not as vanity but as necessity. His prophet, Zarathustra, speaks as one who no longer asks permission to think differently. He mocks convention, chastises comfort, and celebrates those who dare to destroy what they have outgrown.
The same holds true in painting. Every great revolution in art has begun with an act of defiance: Manet’s black mirrors, Picasso’s fractures, Pollock’s drips. To invent new meaning, the artist must dismantle the old. That spirit of transgression — the courage to appear presumptuous, even obscene — is what allows culture to renew itself. Nietzsche’s tone, like the avant-garde’s brushwork, is an affront to politeness. The prophetic voice must offend because it names what the age refuses to see.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that the power of Greek art arose from the interplay between two creative forces: the Apollonian impulse toward order, clarity, and form, and the Dionysian impulse toward ecstasy, chaos, and dissolution.² The Greeks achieved greatness, he said, by balancing these contrary drives — reason and rapture, form and flux — in a single work of art. The same polarity governs painting: the discipline of structure and the abandon of gesture, the line of Apollo and the colour of Dionysus. To create is to mediate between these two gods, and to risk losing oneself to both.
Every artist knows this tension. The Apollonian governs drawing, proportion, and intellectual control — the measured world of the atelier; the Dionysian rules colour, rhythm, and sensation — the ungovernable world of experience. Atelier training disciplines the Apollonian side of the painter; it teaches measure, anatomy, and craft. But the Dionysian — the capacity to act intuitively, to let material lead — can only emerge when that discipline is later risked, even broken. My own teaching tries to keep both alive: to help painters learn the grammar of form without extinguishing the poetry of impulse. It is in the conversation between the rational and the intuitive that real art begins.
The Death of God and the Birth of Art
Nietzsche’s most infamous phrase — “God is dead” — first appeared not in Zarathustra but in The Gay Science, where a madman announces it to a marketplace full of unbelievers who do not yet understand the enormity of what has happened.³ By the time Zarathustra speaks, the news is old; the deed is done. The question now is not what has died, but what will rise in its place. The line was never meant as blasphemy but as diagnosis: that modernity had outlived its metaphysical guarantees. The ground beneath moral and aesthetic certainty had collapsed, and meaning would now have to be created rather than revealed.
This, too, is the painter’s condition. When representation no longer suffices — when painting ceases to be about mirroring the world — the artist finds themselves in Nietzsche’s post-theological space. The task is no longer to depicttruth but to create it. Each mark becomes an act of faith without doctrine, a declaration that beauty can still exist after the death of certainty. To paint after the death of God is to work without permission, to create significance ex nihilo — from colour, matter, and conviction alone.
Nietzsche’s prophet lives in the wake of a metaphysical catastrophe; the modern painter lives in the wake of an aesthetic one. When God dies, transcendence migrates into art. The canvas becomes a new site of metaphysical speculation. Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, a void of pure material presence, is not simply an abstraction but a post-theological icon — a shrine to nothingness that dares still to radiate belief.⁴ Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) reads like a modern gospel, declaring that colour itself can awaken the soul.⁵ Even Clement Greenberg’s mid-century formalism, for all its empiricism, still echoes Nietzsche’s call for new values: the idea that painting must be justified by its own internal logic, purified of imitation and narrative, autonomous in its meaning.⁶
In each case, the “death of God” becomes the birth of autonomy. The artist assumes the divine role: creator of worlds, legislator of form. The modernist canvas, like Zarathustra’s mountaintop, is both solitude and revelation — a place where values are remade in pigment rather than stone.
The Prophetic Tone in Art
Nietzsche’s prophetic voice, with its rhythmic repetition and ecstatic exaggeration, performs what the painter does with gesture. Both operate beyond polite coherence, trusting that form itself can carry conviction. A prophetic style is not ornamental; it is functional. It compels attention through audacity. Likewise, a great painting doesn’t persuade by reasoning — it commands by presence. The brushstroke, like the aphorism, is a unit of conviction.
To work this way is to accept misunderstanding. When Zarathustra first appeared, it was greeted with bewilderment and ridicule; its meaning seemed self-indulgent, even nonsensical.⁷ But art that moves ahead of its time must always appear excessive. What looks like arrogance from the outside is, from within, simply necessity — the confidence required to speak when the language for what you mean does not yet exist.
Kandinsky and Malevich were met with the same incredulity. Their “spiritual” abstractions were accused of nihilism and madness, yet they were, in truth, acts of metaphysical audacity — visual equivalents of Nietzsche’s call to invent new forms of value. The prophet’s riddle and the painter’s abstraction are twin languages of transition: each marks the passage from imitation to creation, from knowing to becoming.
The Necessity of Arrogance
What Nietzsche teaches, and what the history of painting confirms, is that creativity demands a form of ontological arrogance: the belief that one’s perception might be enough to found a world. The destruction of old frameworks — moral, aesthetic, or philosophical — is not an act of nihilism but of renewal. The painter, like Zarathustra, must become both iconoclast and prophet, destroying idols to make space for living gods. The rules of behaviour that constrain expression, the aesthetic manners that domesticate art, all must be violated if art is to live.
Nietzsche’s bombast — that swelling rhythm of self-certainty — mirrors the painter’s necessity to act without assurance. You cannot make a new vision politely. The prophetic tone, whether in language or in paint, is not arrogance for its own sake but the only voice available when one speaks from the edge of understanding.
Pedagogy and the Incomplete
All of this returns, inevitably, to teaching. To read Zarathustra is to learn that learning itself must be both comprehensive and incomplete — to be thorough in seeking, but humble before mystery. The experience of not understanding, yet being moved, is not failure but the beginning of knowledge. My own teaching at the Royal College of Art grows from this conviction: that education in art should invite speculation rather than closure, lengthen the gaze rather than direct it. The aim is not to show students how their work should look, or even where their gaze should go, but to help them live longer in the space where meaning is still forming — to treat incompleteness as a condition of insight rather than an obstacle to it.
Zarathustra’s descent from the mountain is, in the end, a pedagogical act: the prophet becomes teacher, not by explaining but by provoking. So too with painting. The role of the artist — and the teacher of artists — is not to define but to awaken. To create is to guide others into the abyss of their own discovery, and to trust that, like Nietzsche’s prophet, they will find their dancing stars there.
Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883–85), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1961).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Classics, 1993).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), §125 “The Madman,” trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974).
Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting” (1915), in Essays on Art 1915–1933, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968).
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), trans. M. T. H. Sadler (London: Constable, 1914).
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965).
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950).