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Born on 12 February 1884: Max
Beckmann, German
Expressionist
painter who died on 27 December 1950.
— Max Beckmann, often hailed as Germany's greatest 20th-century artist,
was one of the founders of what we now call modern art.
In Beckmann's 1939 painting Woman with
Large Shell and Wine Glass, the vibrant colors are applied with quick,
edgy brushstrokes. This painting is a beautiful example of the joyous aspects
of Beckmann's work that began during his Paris years.
Max Beckmann is not known for his joyousness.
Born in Germany — he died in the US — he is famous for brooding,
symbol-laden self-portraiture, for his mastery of the morose. Sometimes
mythic and always dramatic, Beckmann may well be the epitome of Expressionism,
Germany's great contribution to modern art. It's a style critics came to
love; Hitler to hate (and even some Hitler-haters concur with Hitler on
this one point). But at the start, he was just a gifted, if romantic, realist.
He was a very fine academic person; he studied
the traditions, especially Rembrandt.
He was an excellent draftsman; his anatomy was perfect. He had a perfect
understanding of human structure.
Beckmann's canvases grew with his ambition.
The Titanic, painted in 1912, is as busy as turbulent, as theatrically
tragic as the scene it depicts. But it was World War I that forged Beckmann's
famed Expressionism. A medic on the front, the artist faced such brutality
that he simply broke down. His post war work is radical, dark, and, above
all, personally expressive, as in 1917's Christ Saving an Adulteress
From Stoning — a Christ who looks a lot like Max Beckmann.
Beckmann was one of the great stars in Germany,
one of the hottest painters of the time. For what did he need to go to Paris?
He wanted to be a cosmopolitan, a painter recognized on the European level
such as Picasso,
Matisse,
and Braque
were recognized internationally. In 1929, Beckmann moved to Paris, to exhibit
there and get the French art world to take a German as seriously as it did
its own.
In Beckmann's Resting Woman with Carnations,
a serene, sensuous figure is set against an intricate, decorative pattern
of stylized stripes, tiles, and latticework. This may be compared to Henri
Matisse's exotic Odalisque
With Green Scarf (or Harem Woman), which was painted in
1926. The model in Beckmann's Resting Woman with Carnations also
takes an alluring seated pose. Beckmann's model is his second wife, Quappi.
He painted Quappi flamboyantly, dozens of times, in various stages of dress
and undress. Part of his new Paris persona: Macho artist with sexy wife.
Beckmann didn't just challenge Matisse, however,
but Picasso as well. An example of Picasso's classical style of the 1920's
is a portrait called The
Reader. Beckmann's response is a woman reading.
The German took up specifically French themes
as well: The French seaside is serene to Matisse; to Beckmann, it's an occasion
for a bizarre bathing scene.
Rugby teams to France's Robert Delaunay are
all color. By contrast, Max Beckmann's tangled web of soccer players by
contrast bristles with dark feeling.
Even Beckmann's still-lifes are emotional.
Consider a marine comparison: Picasso's catch of the day, almost funny;
Braque's flat, formal, elegant. Beckmann's creatures, however, convey menace
and a sense of drama in the composition through these enormous teeth that
the fish show, giving it a harshness and a forcefulness that goes away from
a purely esthetic rendering of objects or shapes.
Ultimately, Beckmann was rejected by France,
and not long after, the king of German painting was spurned by his own country
as well. A surviving photo shows how mildly this painting had begun in 1933:
Beckmann, the proud sovereign; Quappi, his young queen. But in 1937, the
Nazis had turned on him, confiscating hundreds of his paintings and taunting
several in their infamous degenerate art show. Beckmann reworked this painting
in 1937 when he was declared degenerate and made it more brooding and less
of a self-portrait than almost like a dark and dramatic painting that almost
forebodes the terrible things that are going to come.
Beckmann fled to Holland, safe in part because
his son was a surgeon in the Luftwaffe. There, he painted fineart''' is
gone the acrobats. He sees dark things, ugly things. The paintings take
on a gloomy look. There's a Roman soldier with a spear that's a thinly disguised
Nazi. There's a bellhop coming in. The bellhop in Beckmann's paintings is
always a messenger bringing news of various kinds, usually bad. And the
acrobats refers to people who make their living by creativity, who are onstage,
disguising themselves, taking different roles, like Beckmann himself, who
sometimes played the acrobat.
It was after the war that, fed up with Europe,
Beckmann was offered a teaching job in America, at Washington University
in St. Louis. There, art student Wally Barker became his assistant. St.
Louis was in a sense Beckmann's Paris, but here, he ruled the roost at last.
In 1950, receiving an honorary degree from Washington University, he summed
up: "Greatness," he said in his speech, "depends alone on the fertile imagination
of the individual. If you love nature with all your heart, new and unimaginable
things in art will occur to you." New and unimaginable things: It might
as well be the motto of modern art. And if Max Beckmann hasn't attained
the stature of his French rivals, well, maybe it's because they're more
important, or maybe because his nervy, odd imagery is just a bit harder
to appreciate.
— LINKS
— Selbstbildnis
als Krankenpfleger (1915, 55x38cm) _ Beckmann served in the medical
services in eastern Prussia, then in Flanders and at Strasbourg. He was
a witness to the first mustard gas attacks around Ypres. At Courtrai, he
was present at operations that surgeons attempted on the wounded and made
detailed drawings of them. His self portrait is built around three elements:
the eye that scrutinizes, the hand that draws, and the red cross. There
is hardly any color. A few months later, Beckmann was sent home to Germany
after suffering a serious mental breakdown. He sought refuge in Frankfurt
where he slowly took up painting again.
— Self
Portrait in Olive and Brown (1945, 62x50cm)
— Self
Portrait in Bowler Hat (1921 etching, 32x24cm; full size, 1262kb) _
Here Beckmann depicts himself as a dandy with a bowler hat, stiff collar,
and cigarette. The profile of a cat sitting on a table behind him to the
left and an ashtray and kerosene lamp to his right fill out the tight composition.
Beckmann created about eighty self-portraits over a career that spanned
virtually half a century. He used his own image and persona to delve into
the complexities of the human soul, showing the variety of selves that make
up an individual. In Self-Portrait in Bowler Hat Beckmann shows
that he is every bit the modern man, confident in his powers of observation
and cool, critical detachment.
— Self-Portrait
(1919 drypoint, 23x19cm; full size, 99kb)
— Christ
with a Woman Taken in Adultery (1917) _ Beckmann came out of a war very
badly hurt, physically and mentally. In this picture you see this guy with
blood all over his hands, the guy who's so superior to the adulteress. What
Beckmann is actually saying here is a plea for mercy, protecting someone.
Beckmann the painter used various modern devices, seeing his subjects from
multiple points of view, for instance. You can look down on the feet of
Christ. And about halfway up the picture you're looking straight across
at him. And at the top of the picture, you're looking up, like we're seeing
the underside of the guy's face. Different perspectives on one scene —
it's what French Cubism was known for: Picasso's double faces, seen at once
head-on and in profile; Braque's still-lifes, seen both straight ahead —
the legs that hold up the table — and from above — the newspaper
and the tabletop itself. Playing with perspective intrigued Beckmann, but
he was more interested in emotions, in energy.
— The
Skaters (1932, 128x98cm; half-size, 2673kb)
— Blind
Man's Buff (1945, 206x439cm for 3 panels: 187x102cm left, 207x104cm
center, 188x106cm right; 1/7 size, 2243kb) This is the most important
of the five triptychs created by Max Beckmann while exiled in Holland between
1937 and 1947, a prudent exile considering the Nazi's inclusion of ten of
his works in their exhibition of "degenerate art" in 1937. Like much of
his art, Blindman's Buff is allusive and symbolic, inviting explication
yet resisting explicit interpretation. Yet, the artist's use of the three-paneled
format that was traditional to Medieval and Renaissance altarpieces evokes
religious associations. Beckmann also drew upon classical sources, calling
the figures at center "the gods" and the animal-headed man the "minotaur."
Throughout the triptych, figures engage in sensual pleasures in a place
where time, represented by a clock without XII or I, has no beginning or
end. In sharp contrast on each wing are the blindfolded man and kneeling
woman who, like prayerful donors in a Renaissance altarpiece, turn their
backs to the confusion behind them.
— Family
(1920) — Dancing
Badden Badden (1923) — Tux
— Man and Women
— Umberto
— Afternoon
(1946) — Argonaux
— 26
Jun - 29 Sep 2003 MOMA exhibition (PDF) with images of [Self-Portrait?
with Trumpet?], Small Death Scene (1906), The Sinking of the Titanic (1912),
The Night (1919), Family Picture (1920), The Dream (1921), The Harbor of
Genoa (1927), Russian Actor Zeretelli (1927), Self-Portrait with Sailor
Hat (1926), Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927), Departure (1933), Journey on
the Fish (1934), The Actors (1942), Hell of the Birds (1938), Falling Man
(1950)
— 27 etchings at FAMSF
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