How Is Modern Art Evidenced Through Max Beckmanns Personal Style
REDISCOVERING THE ART OF MAX BECKMANN
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August 19, 1984
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Hilton Kramer is the editor of The New Criterion.
IN THE WORLD OF CONTEMPO rary art the arrival of a new generation of artists can usually be counted on to cause some abrupt changes in gustation and philosophy. Information technology is not simply on our electric current agreement of art, moreover, that these changes have a profound impact. Our sense of the past is also altered by them. What artists do today, specially if what they practice marks a break with the work of their immediate predecessors, inevitably affects the way nosotros perceive and evaluate past achievement. Every creative move produces its own roster of heroes and masters.
It was to be expected, then, that the Neo- Expressionist motility that has lately won such a spectacular following amidst gimmicky painters and their public would sooner or subsequently consequence in a rediscovery of certain artists of the by - artists whose piece of work could now be seen to have a special analogousness with the Neo-Expressionist outlook. With its emphasis on recognizable but enigmatic imagery, on discordant symbolism and narrative motifs, Neo-Expressionist painting has turned abroad from the polish surfaces and pure forms of Minimal Art equally well as from the cheerful ironies and the smashing, campy jokes of Popular Art. So it was inevitable that the artists who served every bit heroes of these latter movements - Malevich, for example, in the case of Minimalism and Duchamp in the case of Popular Art - would be rejected in favor of a painter more sympathetic to the Neo-Expressionist spirit.
This is what is happening in the current rediscovery of Max Beckmann, the peachy German painter who died in New York in 1950 at the historic period of 66. This twelvemonth happens to marking the centenary of Beckmann'south birth, and, in observance of this ceremony, museums in Germany and the United states have joined in organizing a major retrospective of his piece of work. Germany and the United states of america are the countries where Beckmann began and concluded his extraordinary career and achieved his greatest fame, and they are also the countries where Neo-Expressionist painting has shown its greatest strength and influence. It is therefore plumbing equipment that they should now bring together in initiating the electric current reevaluation of Beckmann's achievement.
The Beckmann retrospective, which covers the unabridged telescopic of his work from 1901 to 1950, opens on Sept. vii at the St. Louis Art Museum, where it remains on view through Nov. 4, and will so travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art (Dec. nine-Feb. 3). It has already been seen in Munich and Berlin. Sadly, the bear witness will not be seen in New York, the city where Beckmann produced his final important pictures. Equally he is unquestionably one of the outstanding artists of the mod epoch, this would represent a loss for the New York art scene at any time. But it must exist counted a special loss at the present moment. For at no time since Beckmann'due south death 34 years ago has his art achieved a greater relevance to the creative interests of gimmicky painting than it has today.
MAX BECKMANN has reemerged equally an exemplary effigy: a principal painter and graphic artist who, in eschewing the tendency toward abstraction and estheticism, persisted in the belief that great art requires great themes and archetypal subjects for its full realization.
In Beckmann's art at that place are many traditional and recognizable motifs - nonetheless life and mural, portraits and street scenes, even some familiar religious subjects - yet everything is conceived on a symbolic scale. Beckmann was a keen observer of gimmicky life, and there is a tough, sardonic element in his fine art - specially in his paintings of German language high life in the 1920's - that would have guaranteed him a reputation equally one of the great satirists of the Weimar period even if he had washed nothing else. But satire was never in itself a sufficient mode of expression for Beckmann.
Whatever his gifts for a certain vein of social observation - and they were very large gifts indeed - Beckmann's deepest interests lay in large metaphysical themes - the themes of honey and expiry, of spiritual crisis and historical tragedy, and of the artist's fate equally visionary and scapegoat. In a great many pictures from his later years, but especially in the remarkable series of symbolic triptychs that so much occupied the artist during the last two decades of his life - paintings such as ''Departure'' (1932-33), ''Temptation'' (1936-37), ''Acrobats'' (1939) and ''The Beginning'' (1946-49) - Beckmann brought this impulse in his piece of work to its highest point of realization. And information technology is largely because of these works that the painter may be seen to take his identify in the magisterial tradition of High german metaphysical art that extends from Goethe and Wagner in the 19th century to Rilke and Thomas Mann in the 20th. Beckmann is the only painter to come out of Germany, I believe, who can exist placed in this exalted visitor without embarrassment or equivocation.
MAX BECKMANN WAS Born IN LEIPZIG on Feb. 12, 1884, the son of a prosperous flour merchant who died 10 years later. From an early age, plain, Beckmann displayed a bang-up interest in art. When he came to the Usa to teach at Washington University in St. Louis in 1947, he told an interviewer for the St. Louis Post-Acceleration: ''When equally a kid of 8 my parents fabricated me return a box of paints I had traded for my tin soldiers, I learned what it is to exist deprived of artistic expression.'' Apocryphal or non, it was a story that came to assume a symbolic significance for Beckmann as the only instance in his life when he was successfully prevented from post-obit the dictates of his talent - something that even the Nazi prohibition of his work in the 30's and early on 40's failed to achieve.
Nowadays one ofttimes hears it said, usually in a tone of caustic censure and grave regret, that it is merely in the crazy, hyped-upward art globe of the 1980's that artists have been known to achieve fame and fortune before the age of xxx. This, at the very least, is testify of a faulty historical memory, and Beckmann's meteoric rising as a immature artist is a case in point. He was already an achieved student painter at 16, and by 22 he was exhibiting his pictures in Berlin and Weimar. He likewise got married in his 22d year - to Minna Tube, an fine art student he met at the Weimar academy - and won the coveted Villa Romana Prize (for a half-dozen- month residence in Florence).
In these starting time years of the new century, every flavour brought the young artist new honors. It was not uncommon for the critics of the period to lavish praise on Beckmann past comparison his work to that of such masters as Rubens, Rembrandt and Delacroix.
This is not the way the early Beckmann looks to the states now, of course. In his 20'southward, Beckmann was unquestionably a very gifted and ambitious painter, but he was likewise, as Peter Selz, now art historian at the University of California in Berkeley, has observed, a ''very traditional'' painter. The all-time of Beckmann's early pictures are his smaller and more personal paintings - the decease scenes, prompted past his mother's death, that he painted in 1906, which are closer in feeling to Edvard Munch than to the erstwhile masters, and the self-portrait he painted in Florence in 1907. No 1 can say what sort of painter Beckmann would have become if events had not intervened to change his entire outlook on life and art, every bit they did with the coming of the world war in 1914, merely on the evidence of his pre-1914 paintings it is reasonable to assume that his entry into the ranks of the modernistic masters would, at the very least, have been severely impeded. Given the kind of success he had come to savour in his 20's and his chiselled rejection of his avant-garde contemporaries, he might never take get a modern painter at all.
BECKMANN WAS xxx YEARS old when the state of war began in 1914. He volunteered to serve equally a medical orderly in the German Ground forces, and he was immediately assigned to the front. Both there and at the field infirmary in Flanders to which he was reassigned in 1915, living in daily, unremitting contact with scenes of suffering and violent decease, he experienced the total horror of the war. Not surprisingly, it was an experience that affected him profoundly. Though he suffered no concrete wounds himself, what Beckmann afterward described every bit ''injuries of the soul'' brought on a nervous breakdown, and he had to be relieved of his duties and sent abode to recover.
There is a sense in which information technology can truly be said that, though his sanity was shortly restored, Beckmann never recovered from this experience. His unabridged view of the man condition and of the means in which art might legitimately attempt to come up to terms with it was permanently contradistinct past his immersion in the carnage of the war. The Beckmann we admire today thus belongs to the generation for whom the war was a decisive, transfiguring experience. In Beckmann'due south case, it separated him forever from the world - and from the art - of his early success, forcing him to carelessness the pieties of his traditional outlook and become, in result, another kind of creative person.
The change had actually begun to make itself felt in his drawings while he was still serving in the war. Somehow, fifty-fifty in that horrific atmosphere, he connected to draw, and he now took his subjects directly from the swarming, suffering life effectually him.
Gone from the war drawings are the complacency and loftier rhetoric of Beckmann's prewar style. Everything is now full-bodied on sharp observation, immediacy of feeling and a determined realism. Inevitably, Beckmann'south war images are a catalogue of horrors, and the impressions on which they were based left a permanent mark on his sensibility. As was true for many of those who served in the state of war and suffered its furnishings, these impressions and the emotions they generated continued to haunt Beckmann's consciousness long after he returned to civilian life. They formed the subtext, and then to speak, of the mordant irony and icy disengagement that came into Beckmann's fine art for the start time in the decade post-obit the war, and they also account for that feeling of claustrophobic anxiety that is one of the distinguishing features of the new art he produced in the 1920'southward.
One thing, all the same, remained unchanged for Beckmann - his overpowering sense of artistic vocation. If anything, he felt it even more strongly as the result of his state of war experience. As Beckmann wrote to his wife from Flanders in 1915: ''I would make my way through all the sewers of the world, through all the degradations and desecrations in order to paint. I must do that. This I must practice until the last drop of imagination to create that lives in me is gone; so it will be a pleasure to permit get of this damning torment.''
It was undoubtedly through his art that Beckmann eventually succeeded in healing those ''injuries of the soul'' that had brought him down, and it was this sense of vocation that sustained him in the shambles that he faced when he returned to noncombatant life. His circumstances had been radically contradistinct likewise. The society to which the painter returned had entered a menses of chaos that mirrored the upheaval of his own psyche. Even his marriage had collapsed. While he remained on friendly terms with his wife, she was now pursuing a successful career of her own every bit an opera singer in Austria, and there was apparently no question of their resuming their former human relationship. It was art that remained his spiritual anchor and the center of his existence, and he threw himself into information technology with an free energy and ferocity that never abated until his death 35 years later.
TO THE ART THAT BECKMANN produced in the twenty's historians take given the name New Objectivity (Neue Sa chlichkeit), based on the exhibition that was organized under that title at the St"adtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim in 1925. Insofar as this term suggests a style grounded in the meticulous delineation of recognizable objects and an attitude of sardonic detachment in their deployment, information technology serves well enough to describe certain aspects of the art to which Beckmann devoted his gifts in this menses. His paintings of the early 20's abound in brilliantly depicted figures and objects enclosed in a tightly delineated iii-dimensional space that seems almost palpable in its lucidity and verisimilitude. Yet the term ''New Objectivity,'' unless it is understood to be ironic (which I think information technology was), does non really convey the overwhelming sense of the irrational - the sense of menace and nightmare - that gives these paintings their characteristic power.
With the ghoulish picture chosen ''The Dark'' (1918-xix), Beckmann signaled his intention to deal with scenes of noncombatant life quite equally if they were a continuation of the horrors of war in another venue (which, in the Deutschland of this period of revolution and its aftermath, they ofttimes were). This theme continued in such paintings as ''The Dream'' (1921), ''Family Motion picture'' (1920) and ''Before the Masked Ball'' (1922), in
which the creative person'due south vision is anything but ''objective'' in the usual sense of that term. The individual figures and objects nosotros find in the works may be meticulously rendered, but the space they occupy is so constricted and distorted - so completely determined by an atmosphere of anxiety and dread - that the paintings themselves cannot be mistaken as anything but a highly subjective and critical account of the feel they encompass. These are paintings that either portend or think us to some catastrophe of the spirit, and they are suffused with a sense of social crisis.
On the basis of such work, which was also accompanied by a copious product of graphic fine art devoted to many of the same themes, Beckmann made a spectacular comeback, and by the mid-20's he was once again established as an artist of recognized eminence. He lived in Frankfurt in this menstruum and was invited to teach a principal class in its leading art university. He exhibited his piece of work in about all the European art capitals and had his first i-human testify in New York in 1926, at I. B. Neumann's New Fine art Circle Gallery. He had married again - to Mathilde von Kaulbach, the beloved ''Quappi'' so familiar to u.s.a. in the many portraits of her painted from the 20's onward - and frequented the milieu of the social and intellectual elite.
By 1929 Beckmann was in a position to alive much of the year in Paris, which he continued to exercise until 1932, traveling to Frankfurt once a month to confer with his students about their piece of work. In 1931 he was represented in an exhibition at the newly founded Museum of Modern Fine art in New York; he had a one-man show at the Galerie de la Renaissance in Paris, and the Musee du Jeu de Paume purchased a painting for its drove. Both in and out of Germany, Beckmann was acknowledged to be a primary.
The atmosphere of feet and the sense of impending doom that remained amidst the artist'due south abiding themes in the xx's proved, however, to exist prophetic. The get-go attacks on Beckmann's fine art in the National Socialist press came in 1931, even before Hitler had come to power, and they accelerated in 1932. As soon equally Hitler seized power in 1933, Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching position in Frankfurt, and the exhibiting of his piece of work was prohibited in the German museums. The Nazi entrada against so-called ''Degenerate Fine art'' was starting time, and Beckmann's celebrity as one of Germany's leading mod painters made him an inevitable target.
Beckmann left Frankfurt for Berlin, hoping that he and his wife could alive in relative anonymity in a city where he was not the recognized eminence he had become in Frankfurt, simply this proved to be a false hope. Hitler was naught if non serious in his plan to wipe out all traces of ''Cultural Bolshevism,'' as modernist fine art was sometimes chosen by the Nazi propaganda machine. In 1936 even the publication of art criticism was prohibited, and in 1937 came the mammoth exhibition of ''Degenerate Art'' in Munich that marked the grand finale of the Nazi campaign. Nearly 600 works past Beckmann - paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints - were confiscated from the German language museums in the form of this campaign, and on the day the ''Degenerate Fine art'' exhibition opened the Beckmanns left Germany for Amsterdam. Beckmann himself never returned. Twice he attempted to emigrate to the Usa, just zilch came of these efforts. For a time, the Beckmanns shuttled between Amsterdam and Paris, but in the summer of 1939 they settled in Amsterdam to wait out the war that everyone knew was coming.
What is astonishing near this menses in the creative person's life is that from the beginning of Hitler's ascent to power correct through to the end of Earth War Ii Beckmann not only continued to practice his art without interruption simply actually produced his most of import paintings. He painted like a man possessed - which, in a very existent sense, he was. And what possessed him with a driving intensity was the realization that life itself, in all of its vehement absurdity and malevolent impulse, its power to destroy as well as to create, had now become the kind of nightmare that fine art - his own fine art especially - had and so frequently prophesied as a possibility. The night night of the soul had suddenly acquired the force and reality of firsthand experience. History had made palpable what had previously only been imagined.
Beckmann's was an imagination that had always been inclined to metaphysical reflection. Information technology was an imagination drawn to myth, symbolism and allegory as a means of dealing with and giving expression to the ultimate paradoxes of life and death. History, as information technology came to be embodied in the social and political upheavals of the artist's ain time, was not so much excluded - for it wasn't excluded at all - as it was subsumed in a metaphysical drama of visionary archetypes. Now that history had itself get an evil allegory, at that place was no longer a useful distinction to exist made - for an artist of Beckmann'southward disposition - between the literal and the symbolic levels of expression.
THIS UNWONTED CONvergence of the historical and the imaginary, of reality and myth, had the effect of releasing in Beckmann his deepest impulses every bit a painter. It launched him upon the near ambitious pictorial projection of his career - the sequence of symbolic triptychs in which the theme of the artist's fate and elements of political symbolism are combined with figures and objects drawn from mythology, literature, sacred texts and the creative person's personal memories to form a series of emblematic commentaries on the life of the times, and on life itself.
The first of the triptychs - ''Departure'' (1932-33), now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Mod Art in New York - undoubtedly had its origin in the portent (as information technology and so was) of Hitler'due south rise to ability and what, as Beckmann saw it, this would mean to European civilization. Merely the origin of a painting does non necessarily account for everything it contains. Beckmann always adamantly resisted the tendency of critics to burden the work with a purely political interpretation - or, indeed, a literal interpretation of any sort - and he was surely right nearly this. He had seen plenty politically committed art in Federal republic of germany in the 20's to know how perishable and superficial it could be, and in any case his own work was conceived at a level of symbolic complexity that did non lend itself to such a narrow reading.
When his New York dealer, Short Valentin, a German emigre whom the artist had got
ten to know in Germany in the xx's, asked Beckmann in 1938 to explicate the significant of ''Departure,'' he replied:
''The picture speaks to me of truths impossible for me to put into words and of which I did not always know before. I tin can only speak to people who, consciously or unconsciously, already conduct within them a similar metaphysical code. Deviation, yes divergence, from the illusions of life toward the essential realities that prevarication subconscious beyond.''
And he added, ''It is to be said that 'Departure' bears no tendentious meaning - it could well be applied to all times.'' Merely this does not preclude the possibility that a meaning that can exist ''applied to all times'' may well accept a detail relevance to its ain time every bit well, and with its shackled and blindfolded figures, its atmosphere of imminent violence, and its central prototype of a mythic voyage, ''Departure'' does indeed have much to say about the historical moment that prompted its creation.
There are ix triptychs in all, 5 of which belong to the amazingly fecund 10-year period (1937-47) when Beckmann lived mainly as a refugee in Amsterdam. The final in the series, ''The Argonauts'' (1949-50), was completed in New York on Dec. 26, 1950, the day before Beckmann collapsed on the street while taking a walk. In an essay on this period written for the catalogue accompanying the current retrospective, Stephan Lackner points out that exactly one-third of all the paintings in the Beckmann oeuvre - some 280 works - were produced during this x-year exile. This in itself represents ane of the nearly heroic feats in the history of modern painting. Quappi Beckmann reported that by the stop of the state of war Max had painted their last bedsheets, and they were now sleeping on their terminal remaining tablecloth.
Beckmann'southward wartime exile in Amsterdam, which was, of course, occupied by the German Army, involved him in an on-once again-off-once more game of hide-and-seek with the Nazi authorities. At times he was simply disregarded, but twice he was called up for service in the German Army and turned down considering of the centre affliction that was already well developed and that eventually acquired his decease. Friends in the Dutch art world helped to hide his pictures - no easy thing, because his productivity - and some were even smuggled into Germany by devoted admirers who made undercover purchases. The defeat of Germany brought a new danger: that the Beckmanns might be sent back to Deutschland every bit enemy aliens. But a member of the Dutch secret whom Beckmann had helped during the state of war came forrad to defend him, and he was officially declared a ''non-enemy.'' However through this turmoil Beckmann connected to paint with a demonic free energy.
Still, he was eager to come to America when the war was over. By now he had many friends and admirers at that place, and the opportunity came in 1947, when the art schoolhouse of Washington University in St. Louis invited him to take over the professorship temporarily vacated past Philip Guston. The Beckmanns arrived in New York in Baronial 1947, and his piece of work received a warm welcome. His paintings were widely exhibited; collectors were eager to acquire his paintings and prints. Ane of these collectors - Morton D. May, chairman and president of the May Department Stores Company in St. Louis - clustered what eventually became the unmarried most comprehensive collection of Beckmann's work, and left it to the St. Louis Art Museum. (Information technology is in his memory that the company has funded the current retrospective.) In 1949 Beckmann settled in New York to take up a teaching post at the Brooklyn Museum Fine art School. He had lived but long enough to larn withal again, in an entirely new setting, the status of an eminent master, and he was working at the height of his powers when he died.
In the years post-obit his decease, Beckmann continued to be admired and respected, merely more and more as a historical effigy than every bit an influential artistic presence. With each successive modify in way and taste, from Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Dada to color-field abstraction, Minimal Fine art and Pop Fine art, Beckmann's piece of work came to seem more than and more alien to the art globe. When Peter Selz, then curator of painting and sculpture, organized an of import retrospective at the Museum of Modernistic Art in 1964, it met with little artistic response. Pop Fine art was the rage, and nothing could have been more distant in spirit from Beckmann'southward tragic vision than the Pop sensibility, with its campy taste and its facetious attitude toward fine art and life. Beckmann withal had his admirers, of form, just the cultural tide was running against everything he had stood for.
It was a view of art - and of its relation to life - that brutal on deafened ears for many years. But with the ascension of the Neo-Expressionist movement in painting in recent years, which is attempting to blot and interpret a bully bargain of contempo history - everything from the politics of the Nazi era to the sexual revolution and drug civilisation of the 1960's - the return of Max Beckmann in this swell retrospective exhibition makes him yet again a main for our time.
In artists as diverse every bit Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and J"org Immendorff in Deutschland and Eric Fischl, Malcolm Morley and Julian Schnabel in the United States, we have seen the reintroduction of the kind of mythic and symbolic imagery that Beckmann made so key an element in his art. In Eric Fis chl'southward painting, with its emphasis on narrative imagery, commonly focused on contemporary erotic themes, the debt to Beckmann is more explicit, perhaps, than elsewhere. (Fischl has best-selling Beckmann'south ''Departure,'' the triptych in the Museum of Modern Art collection, as a major influence on his work.) But something of Beckmann's spirit tin too exist discerned in Anselm Kiefer's evocative, overscale paintings on themes drawn from recent German history, peculiarly the history of the Nazi era and elements of the High german past associated with it. Similarly, J"org Immendorff'south eerie pictorial commentaries on life in a divided Germany show a remarkable analogousness for a view of painting that is closer to Beckmann's than to that of whatever other modern chief.
It isn't so much considering of direct influence, however, that these and other painters of the Neo-Expressionist school may exist regarded as Beckmann'due south heirs. It is, rather, their determination to make painting itself a medium of symbolic expression - an artistic medium capable of encompassing and interpreting the complexities of contemporary experience - that places them in a line of esthetic descent from Beckmann and his philosophy of art. The baroque juxtaposition of images and objects we notice in Julian Schnabel, the enigmatic anecdotes that make Malcolm Morley's recent paintings at one time so mysterious and so compelling, the disorienting, upside-down figures of Georg Baselitz's paintings - in the work of these and other Neo-Expressionist painters we are in one case once more in the presence of an art that aspires to requite us, as Beckmann said, ''the reality which forms the mystery of our beingness.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/19/magazine/rediscovering-the-art-of-max-beckmann.html
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