What do a dead German Modernist named Max Beckmann and a young UMass undergrad named Dereck Mangus have in common? More than you might think.

Both have paintings on exhibit at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. Both paintings are self-portraits. But the affinity is even greater, and stranger, than that. Mangus’s self-portrait is Beckmann’s self-portrait. At least, in a manner of speaking.

It seems that Mangus, who is a Junior Art Major working towards a BA, wanted to paint a picture of himself. But rather than do a traditional self-portrait, he hit upon the idea of basing his painting upon another artist’s work. In this way, the work would be more than an artist’s image of himself; it would be a comment upon the image of the artist in a larger sense, a kind of appropriated parody. I caught up with Mangus recently and asked him if he would explain this work, as well as his general position as an artist.

Q: Your painting, “Self-Portrait (Posed as Max Beckmann)”, was recently on show at the Fogg. How did this come about?

A: First of all, I’m a security guard at the Fogg Art Museum, or a museum attendant as they say, and it was a staff show up for the month of August. Everyone from security on up to curatorial people could put work in the exhibition. Everyone was allowed to put in two pieces. I chose to just put in one because I didn’t want an unintentional dialogue between two pieces, especially because my piece is very specific. I was the only artist to show work that had a pun or a connection to an actual pre-existing piece in our museum. The original piece, Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait” from 1927, is actually in the Busch-Reisenger Museum attached to the back of the Fogg. [The Busch-Reisenger Museum] holds Germanic art and design from 1880 onwards.

Q: How did you get the idea to do this painting?

A: I decided to have some fun with the sort of serious, somber tone of a lot of Modern, capital ‘M’, art, a lot of self-portraits by Modern artists like Picasso, or Max Beckmann. They’re always so serious; I thought it would be kind of fun…I wouldn’t go so far as to say my piece was Post Modern, but it’s definitely got that parody angle. It’s tongue-in-cheek. Instead of making an exact replica, which is sort of popular in the Post Modern way, I decided to replace his somber, serious face with my grinning, foolish prankster-like face…even though it is sort of fun, it is serious in a way too because it is a reference to the too serious quality of Modern art.

I wanted to do something specific for the show, I didn’t want to show a painting that had nothing to do with the Fogg. I had been thinking for months that the Beckmann piece was hilarious, just his sort of stance, his glare, the whole European-Modern thing about it, I just thought was funny. In its time, it was probably seen as really classy, but because of all that’s happened since, that kind of thing is almost like kitsch now, in a way. It’s funny how things change.

Q: Does the work, for you, have anything in common with works such as Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.”, in which the artist painted a mustache on Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”?

A: That’s a good point. Yeah. Duchamp is definitely in that vein. Even though he was a Modern artist in terms of his time frame, he was definitely ahead of time in terms of the making fun of the serious individual artist, and the machismo of say, Picasso, Pollack, Beckmann.

Q: Your piece intentionally uses another piece as a foundation and reference point. Is there a comment here about the nature of replication and artistic originality?

A: Well, back to Duchamp again, there is a story about his “Nude Descending A Staircase”. He sold it, and someone else wanted it, and he said, ‘well, that’s fine, I’ll just paint you another one.’ And he just painted another, exactly the same, and sold it again. That’s a comment similar to my comment on the absurdity of the idea of the holiness of one piece, one single thing, one single act…I think a lot of Modern artists are so caught up in their own agendas, but really it’s just paint.

It’s hard, I think, as an artist at any time to not make art that doesn’t comment on other art because what is art but just a continuation of the original shout, or yell, or drumbeat or pen or brush stroke or whatever? Everything has been done. A lot of people think that is depressing, but I think that it’s great. Everything has been done; let’s just keep doing it.

Q: I know that in the planning for this piece you had taken a digital image of the original work and digitally placed your image on top of it. What is your opinion on the status of digital technology in the art world?

A: I definitely think the computer is…we haven’t seen what it’s really going to do in terms of fine arts yet, I don’t think. A couple artists have experimented with Internet stuff. It seems kind of cheesy so far, but I’m definitely not against the computer in art at all…by the same token though, I feel that painting will never go away. A lot of artists are saying, ‘oh no, the computer is going to replace paint’. I think not…if anything, the computer is just another tool that will aid in the process of making art.

I did a couple of paintings about a year ago for a class with Wilfredo Chiesa where I took images from photographs, which I took into Photoshop to really tweak them with the computer, and then painted from those digitally mediated images. In the end, you get a painting that has a painterly quality, but at the same time you feel it has a sort of fresh, hip, computer-like quality. Like design. I try to blur the line between fine art and poster design style.

Q: What drives you as an artist?

A: Hmm…well, cleverness drives me; if I have to sum it up in one word…I’m more rationally minded about art than emotionally based.

Q: Do you have plans for future works?

A: There’s something funny that people keep saying to me at the museum, certain curators and higher-ups at the Fogg keep asking me, “Well, what are you going to do with it now?” In other words, they literally thought it was just a joke, like once the show is over I’m just going to throw it away. What do you mean what am I going to do with it? I’ll keep it. I might take this into a series. There’s a famous Van Gogh self-portrait at the Fogg. I might emulate his style and replace my grinning face instead of his somber face. There’s a famous Picasso self-portrait with his somber expression. There are all these famous Modernists that have these similar expressions. Maybe that’s because in their time all these terrible things were happening; nowadays, terrible things are still happening, but we’re desensitized to it.

Q: They say we live in the age of irony.

A: Yeah. The age of irony.