^
Born on 12 February 1884: Max
Beckmann, German
Expressionist
painter who died on 27 December 1950.
— Beckmann was born into a farming family, which gave up its farm
and moved to Leipzig after his birth. Beckmann drew from a young age, and
in 1900 entered the Weimar Academy of Arts. He married Minna Tube in 1903,
and the two moved to Paris. Beckmann also visited Florence and Geneva, before
settling in Berlin in 1904. His earliest paintings show the influence of
the impressionists. His work was popular, and he was able to make a living
from his art.
Beckmann served as a medic in World War I,
but was dismissed after he suffered a nervous breakdown. His experiences
in the war had a big effect on his art, and were an important factor in
pushing his style in a more expressionist direction.
Beckmann taught art in Frankfurt am Main
from 1915, but was dismissed from his post by the Nazi Party in 1933. At
the beginning of the 30s, he made visits to Paris to paint, and it was around
this time that he began to use the triptych format, influenced in part by
Hieronymus Bosch [1450 – 09 Aug 1516].
His art was included in the notorious traveling
exhibition Entartete
Kunst of the Nazis, which opened in Munich on 17 July 1937. The next
day Beckmann wisely moved to Amsterdam. In 1947, he moved again to the United
States, first to Missouri and later to New York City. He died in 1950 of
a heart attack while on his way to see an exhibition of his work at the
Metropolitan Museum.
Beckmann painted a number of self-portraits,
including Self Portrait in Tuxedo (1927). Many of his other works
represent scenes from everyday life. They often show grotesque, mutilated
bodies, and are seen as commenting on the wrong-doings of the German government
in the 1920s and 1930s as well as harking back to his World War I experiences.
— Beckmann was trained from 1900 to 1903 at the conservative Weimar
Academy, where he was influenced by the idealistic classicism of his master,
Hans von Marées. In 1904 Beckmann moved to Berlin, where he adopted
the lush brushwork of the German Impressionist Lovis Corinth. In 1906 he
joined the prestigious Berlin Sezession, and in the same year he met the
Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch [12 Dec 1863 – 23 Jan
1944], whose morbid, curvilinear compositions influenced Beckmann to develop
an Expressionistic style.
Beckmann served as a medical corpsman in
World War I. The shock of exposure to dead and maimed soldiers changed his
art, filling it with the sordid, often horrifying imagery that characterizes
his mature work. The distorted figures of The Descent from the Cross
(1917) and its pendant, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
(1917), illustrate his new style. Many such paintings depict scenes of lust,
cruelty, and pain in settings that have symbolic or allegorical overtones.
Angular, harshly delineated figures are tightly grouped in a strangely compressed,
flattened space that lends a disquieting tension to the scene. In The
Night (1919), a scene of nightmarish sadism, the disquieting colors
and violent forms convey Beckmann's pessimism over man's bestiality. The
portraits, still lifes, and landscapes that he undertook in the 1920s are
more conciliatory in mood.
In 1933 the Nazis declared Beckmann's art
“degenerate” and forced him to resign his professorship at the
Städel School of Art in Frankfurt. He returned to Berlin, where he
completed Departure (1933), the first of the large-scale allegorical
triptychs that constitute his most important works.
Finding the conditions in Germany intolerable,
he fled to Amsterdam in 1937. In 1947 he moved to the United States, where
he taught for three years at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Among the most important fruits of his years of exile are such triptychs
as The Actors (1942), Carnival (1943), and Blindman's
Bluff (1945). Although they retain many of his earlier violent themes,
the late triptychs, especially his Argonauts (1950), completed on the day
of his death, affirm Beckmann's belief in the ineradicable human spirit.
His numerous self-portraits provide a moving record of the artist's spiritual
experience.
— 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 in 1937, safe in
part because his son was a surgeon in the Luftwaffe. There, he painted The
Acrobats (1939 triptych: center 199x170cm, sides, 199x90cm each).
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 the US, 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, 538kb)
— Self-Portrait
in Tuxedo (1927; 1104x749pix, 88kb)
— Self-Portrait
with Horn (666x609pix, 53kb _ ZOOM
to 1000x912pix, 85kb)
— Self-portrait
with red scarf (1917; 636x487pix, 60kb)
— Self-Portrait
(1911 lithograph, 25x18cm; 878x706pix, 437kb)
— The
“Circus Beckmann” Crier (Self-Portrait) (1921 etching, 34x26cm;
408x307pix, 28kb)
— Christ
with a Woman Taken in Adultery (1917, 669x560kb, 158kb) _ 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; 1159x883pix _ ZOOM
to 2318x1766pix, 3202kb)
— Blind
Man's Buff (1945, 206x439cm for 3 panels: 187x102cm left, 207x104cm
center, 188x106cm right; 1/12 size _ ZOOM
to 1/6 size, 3019kb) 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
Picture (1920; 650x1000pix, 183kb)
— Dancing
Bar in Baden Baden (1923; 1000x627pix, 117kb)
— Umberto
(1500x638pix, 191kb)
— Afternoon
(1946, 90x134cm; 750x1122kb, 168kb)
— The
Argonauts (1950 triptych, center panel 80 1/4x48"; side panels each
74 3/8x33", 589x867pix, 101kb) _ The nine triptychs that Beckman created
are an incredibly rich and varied repository of pictorial ideas and visions.
Their form is a revival of the medieval altarpiece, a shrine whose wings
were closed except on holidays when its gospel lore and legends of saints
and martyrs were revealed. This historical connotation explains why the
wings of Beckmann's triptychs, although they do not close, are usually much
narrower than the center panel (see Departure and Temptation).
The Argonauts is the most serene
of Beckmann's post-Christian altarpieces. The earlier triptychs show many
tortured, shackled, and maimed people, as well as some who are deceived,
sadistic, and simply foolish. The figures in The Argonauts are
healthy, self-reliant, and enterprising. The elements of lust and baseness
were required in the earlier works to set off the spheres of the persecuted
hero and the confused dreamer; now, in the last work, the hero as a dreamer,
or the dreamer as a hero, has conquered the nightmarish aspects of life.
Thus, in retrospect, The Argonauts triptych appears as the logical
conclusion of Beckmann's lifelong "passing show."
Beckmann initially called this work The
Artists. The bearded, intense, contemporary artist in the left panel,
not a self-portrait, was the first figure that Beckmann envisioned. Perhaps
he saw this painter as the prime mover of the entire phantasmagoria, in
whose mind a modern model is transmuted into the classical figure of Medea.
The artist knows that the head on which the woman sits is only a hollow
mask, not really a decapitated Greek, and that the sword is but a studio
prop. The girl musicians in the right panel are already half-transformed
into an antique chorus. In the center panel, the fantasy is victorious;
there is no trace of present-day metier left, no smell of studio dust and
oil paint, only the clear, salty breeze of antiquity. Art has conquered
the prosaic everyday.
The center panel illustrates, quite faithfully,
an episode from Greek mythology. Beckmann had read Goethe's translation
of an account by Philostratus from the third century BC concerning the Argonauts'
voyage to the Black Sea. The young heroes Orpheus and Jason are shown embarking
on their search for the Golden Fleece. Orpheus, by his song, has calmed
the wild sea and has put down his lyre on the sand. The ancient sea-god
Glaucus emerges from the waves to prophesy the fate of the bold travelers;
their magic ship, the Argo, will carry them safely to the mist-darkened
kingdom of Colchis where they will "liberate" not only the Golden
Fleece but also the king's daughter, Medea. This tale is a reflection of
the historical first expeditions of the seafaring Greeks to barbarian lands.
Beckmann, to heighten the portent of the
sea-god's prophecy, shows sun and moon darkened by a miraculous eclipse
and new planets being born. The cosmic menace does not distract the keen
youths from their purpose, and the ancient prophet points the way to their
heroic, and finally tragic, pursuit. Accept your fate, he seems to admonish
them, fulfill your task.
This triptych recalls some of Beckmann's
very early pictographs: the darkened sun had already appeared in The Descent
from the Cross of 1917. The ladder, one of Beckmann's favorite symbols,
led nowhere in the early Dream and thus made cruel fun of a poor mortal
searching for an exit from his misery; in The Argonauts the ladder rises
out of the primeval ocean straight up into blue eternity: there is a way
out, it proclaims.
But the most touching reminiscence is the
reprise of the "golden youths" from Beckmann's first large-scale
oil painting, Young Men by the Sea of 1905. This composition owes much to
the art student's admiration for Luca Signorelli and Hans von Marées.
The maturing Beckmann often came back to the gestalt of the slender, dreamy
youths with their unselfconscious charm. The center panel of his last work
presents them again: thoughtful, willing to risk much for a great purpose,
manly, and radiant with the bloom of youth. Forty-five years of relentless
artistic effort resulted in this seemingly spontaneous personification of
the élan vital.
Through much of Beckmann's career, critics
objected to two supposed characteristics of his art: brutality and sex.
Beckmann never quite knew why they singled him out, for sex and violence
seem to pervade the huge battle scenes and the depictions of rape and martyrdom
in so many museums of the world. Beckmann used to say, somewhat naively:
"Really, I only wanted to paint beautiful pictures." In The
Argonauts this intention is undeniably fulfilled. There is no violence
here, and sex, too, has disappeared. The center panel is restricted to male
figures, the right to females exclusively. This separation of the sexes,
very rare in Beckmann's work, gives an atmosphere of otherworldliness to
The Argonauts. Eros and aggression, which are the heritage of the
human psyche, are sublimated into a spiritual adventure. A glowing love
of beauty and harmony prevails in the end.
— Departure
(1933; 756x1130pix, 207kb) with commentary.
— Temptation
(709x1202pix, 200kb)
— The
Sinking of the Titanic (1912, 265x330cm; 514x641pix, 84kb _ ZOOM
to 729x978pix, 122kb)
— The
Night (1919, 133x154cm; 554x646pix, 97kb _ ZOOM
to 832x969pix, 111kb)
— Hell
of the Birds (1938, 120x160cm; 486x652pix, 84kb _ ZOOM
to 771x961pix, 97kb)
— 27 etchings at FAMSF
— 26
Jun - 29 Sep 2003 MOMA exhibition (PDF)
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