Max Beckmann: A Mirror of Reality
by H. L. Resnikoff / Les Vieilles Ventes
New Yorkers will want to block time on their 2003 calendar for the arrival of Max Beckmann: A Painter in History at MoMAQNS, 25 June — 30 September 2003. The exhibit opened at the Pompidou Center in Paris on September 12, 2002, a fitting way to mark life after the first anniversary of 9/11. It moves to the Tate Modern on 13 February and, finally, to New York. With the exception of two early beach scenes from 1904 and 1905 that were evidently included for comparison with later works on the same theme, the paintings cover the period 1917 until his death.
Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884 and lived most of his life in Germany. He made his first visit to Paris in 1903 and later kept an apartment there. In World War I Beckmann served in a field hospital unit in Belgium, and was mustered out in 1915 with a nervous breakdown and a new insight into the human condition. His Descent from the Cross (1917), a highlight of his post-WWI period, is the only ‘Descent’ I know that shows the effects of rigor mortis, which makes the humanity of this iconic figure all the more evident and powerful.
He was an early and prominent victim of the Nazi effort to control art; 24 of his works appeared in the "degenerate art" exhibit in Munich in 1938. In 1936 he formed the plan of emigrating to America although he did not succeed until after WWII. He was widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States from 1938 on and many of the works in the show come from American museums and private collections. In 1947 he accepted a teaching position at Washington University in St Louis but moved to New York in 1949 as professor of painting and drawing at the Brooklyn Museum. Beckmann died of a heart attack at 61st Street and Central Park West in 1950, on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Beckmann’s artistic life was formed by his experiences in WWI and confirmed by the rise of fascism and WWII, but his art speaks about human universals.
He often used his own image in his paintings. Nine self-portraits, from 1917 through 1950, provide the viewer with a key to the meaning of all his work. In seven of these paintings he is wearing a jacket and tie, if not formal attire. The well-dressed man, holding a cigarette or drinking a glass of champagne, is Beckmann’s metaphor for civilization. His Self-Portrait in Smoking is the epitome of the urbane, asking, in 1936, with Germany under the heel of the Nazis, "What now?" Civilization looks straight at the viewer — and the wider world — with open eyes and without illusions, questioning our intentions and commitment. This great painting works just as well in 2002.
Unlike most great portraits, this one looks outward rather than inward. It brings to mind Manet’s path-breaking D�jeuner sur l’herbe (1862/63), whose protagonist — although she is nude — achieves through direct eye contact a similar effect of representing something more civilized than the rude viewer intruding on the scene.
The earliest self-portrait on display was painted while the war still raged after Beckmann’s breakdown in 1917. It shows the artist in his studio, face contorted with fear, looking from the corners of his wide-open eyes at, or for, a terrifying something the viewer cannot see. In 1937, in formal attire, the open eyes of Beckmann’s metaphor for civilization are also looking sideways, wary of a pursuer. In 1945 we see the artist in his studio again, this time gazing directly at the viewer with an expression of ineffable sadness on a face masked in shadow.
Beckmann said, "The greatest mystery of all is reality," but he had no need for conceptual, i.e. abstract, visual metaphors to explore the mystery because he was able to express the meanings he intended for the subject matter of his work — the inner and outer conflicts of being human — within the corpus of visual metaphors based on familiar mimetic images accessible to the senses. Thus he was a ‘realist’ painter — the mirror of an awful reality — although his work is no less ‘modernist’ than the work of his peers who conceived abstract metaphors to represent intangibles. He also created a new style that combined visual metaphors in a unique and powerful way: a Beckmann looks like nothing else, just as a Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman look like nothing else.
The Paris exhibition sets a high standard of presentation that, preserving the individuality of the paintings while it emphasizes their relationships, creates private moments for the viewer to recover from their overwhelming impact.
H. L. Resnikoff
Les Vieilles Ventes
©2002 Resnikoff Innovations, LLC
