Benjamin Creme
lithographs
About
Benjamin Creme 1922 – 2016
“Art is the expression by the artist of his perception of Reality from his response to its vibration.’
Benjamin Creme was born in Glasgow, Scotland, of Jewish and Catholic parents. When he was 13 years old he came across a stub of a 2B pencil on the ground and discovered how well he could fashion light and shade with it. From that time, with no encouragement from his family, he determined that his vocation in life was to be a painter.
BC left home at 16, took up with the Glasgow art set in the 1940s and met Jankel Adler, a Polish painter of the modernist European school, who became his teacher. BC’s portraits from his early 20s, often vaguely cubist in style, were mature and accomplished. They had a particular quality in their appeal: a blending of precise, carefully wrought formal features combined with a disarming tenderness. For the next two decades he painted mainly portraits and, later, landscapes. His painting Sibylline Figure is in the permanent collection of the Scottish Museum of Modern Art.
But from around 1963 Benjamin Creme’s art began to change radically – he evolved his ‘esoteric’ art that he called ‘modern mandalas’, which reflected his growing commitment to the Ageless Wisdom Teachings and his new life’s work of spreading information about the emergence of Maitreya the World Teacher.
Many of Creme's paintings are held in The Benjamin Creme Museum, in Los Angeles, open every weekend to visitors.
More information about Creme's esoteric paintings can be found in The Esoteric Art of Benjamin Creme, published in 2017.
More information about Creme's earlier work can be found via England & Co Gallery.