Max Beckmann
Have you ever felt that something was missing in modernist art? Take the recent “Matisse/Picasso” show at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens. Dueling genuises. The two titans of 20th century art – one a lyrical colorist, one a demonic form-bender. Opposite poles.
What more do you want? Well, as the show pointed out, these two artists were more alike than has been commonly thought.
Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait as a Clown” from 1921.
Both were painters of motifs. Matisse had his goldfish, his exotic odalisques, his windows. Picasso had his skulls, his fractured women, and, of course, himself, the protean artist. And they both had this whole new way of painting things, which was the main point: a new language of flattened space, arbitrary color, and bodies that didn’t conform to the rules of anatomy.
And because they were serving up all this new stuff, it was taken for granted that they wouldn’t also present the old stuff, the drama, some story or event with character and plot and narrative (although Picasso did a little of that with “Guernica” and his Minotaur series). In fact, it seemed a violation of modernist purity to get too involved in content. Art was supposed to be more like music than theater.
And yet, in retrospect, it seems a bit stiff, this way of thinking. Why couldn’t an artist do both? Why couldn’t you take the modernist language and put it in the service of a profound subject? Well, not only is such a thing feasible, but there was an artist who did precisely that: Max Beckmann. Beckmann, almost an exact contemporary of the other two titans, was born in 1884, a few years after Picasso, and died in 1950, a few years before Matisse. Beckmann is one of the modern era’s most undervalued artists. Now he has moved into the Modern’s space in Queens with such a commanding presence that he seems to have routed the previous two combatants.
Beckmann is considered a German expressionist, a classification that doesn’t really do him justice and also partly explains why his popularity lags behind his accomplishments. German expressionism carries a stigma. It is seen as the product of a deranged culture. No matter that the artists were reacting eloquently to the evil around them. The jarring distortions of form and color, the tableaux of subhuman and depraved passions, reflect a time and place that most people would like to forget.
Matisse and Picasso, despite living under German occupation, did a pretty good job of ignoring the war and its preludes. Beckmann never had that luxury. His loss of innocence began with his service as a medic in World War I, an experience that led to a nervous breakdown. Later, in Hitler’s Germany, he was the star of the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibit of 1937. That marked the beginning of a life of exile that ended 13 years later with his death in New York City.
He’s a dark painter. There’s no getting around that. But Beckmann’s art is not political art in being limited to the specifics of his time. It’s about the universal problems of human cruelty and pain. In that respect, he fits in with the German tradition. From the Middle Ages onward, the Germans excelled at scenes of martyrdom and suffering.
Beckmann’s sharp-edged forms and crowded, claustrophobic spaces owe much to old master German art, as does his love of the multiple-panel painting. Consider his best-known work, the tryptich “Departure.” The left panel is a scene of torture: a man with his hands cut off, a woman seemingly awaiting decapitation. The carnage continues in the right panel, in what looks like a macabre carnival. Contrasting with both these pictures, the center panel shows the departure of a royal family – a crowned king, his wife and child, afloat on a calm blue sea.
The painting is generally taken as a representation of Beckmann’s own flight from Nazi Germany, although it was painted at least five years before that. Nothing is crystal clear in Beckmann’s allegories. In an earlier painting, “The Night,” of 1918-19, a man and woman are being tortured in their apartment. Where are we? Who are the players? The villains are a pipe-smoking “idealogue” and a thug in a Bolshevik worker’s hat. As gripping as the actual mayhem is the surreal way the space itself seems to convulse with terror, the ceiling and walls bending and buckling.
Structurally, the crowded space with its harsh, shard-like forms is nothing if not cubistic. It’s organized very much like a Picasso still life, and yet, it is far from a decorative arrangement of objects. It’s not a composition that is meant to be appreciated purely for its spatial tensions and color balance – although all that is there. Beckmann is juggling several more balls than the other greats. The painting has the illogical feeling of a nightmare – which makes it a little like surrealism, too. But unlike the vaguely Freudian, free-associative quality of most surrealism – Dali’s melting clocks and cracked landscapes, for example – Beckmann’s subject is profound, a nightmare that’s not so easy to wake up from.
The exhibit traces Beckmann’s beginnings, with little known early works that are responses to the work of Vuillard, Van Gogh, Manet, and Degas. His most ambitious early work, “The Sinking of the Titanic,” brings to mind Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa,” with its crowded lifeboats and struggling victims, but also owes something to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” Beckmann was said to have intended it as an allegory of humankind’s misplaced faith in technology.
As the show progresses, you realize that Beckmann – technically brilliant, incredibly inventive – really belongs in a class by himself. He left enough fascinating self-portraits to keep us guessing about his complex character. Take the enigmatic and elegant “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo,” in which the artist plays with the image of himself as a sophisticate and bon vivant – something he certainly was when the opportunity was there. There are paintings of death, birth, and complex, multi-panel paintings that seem to take aim at the whole human condition. All have a theatrical richness.
Beckmann stocked his dramas with archtypical characters: kings, jesters, soldiers, prostitutes, murderers, and beauties. In some, the theatricality is literal, and the characters are actually actors on a stage. Some works seem autobiographical, some the product of a personal mythology that is not always so easy to decipher. Who can guess why the man and woman holding up theatrical masks are strapped to giant fish that seem to be falling from the sky? Meaning is less elusive in “Falling Man” from 1950, the last year of his life. (Beckmann died of a heart attack at 61st Street and Central Park West.) The apocalyptic image depicts a man falling Icarus-like from the sky, passing burning apartment buildings on the way down. It’s an oddly beautiful painting for such a theme. Below the stiffly falling man is a horizonless expanse of sparkling blue sky and water. We and all our creations are ultimately doomed, Beckmann tells us. And yet, there is beauty, right up to the very end.
Museum of Modern Art Long Island City, Queens
2003
