JOHN ZEAMAN

Modernism

Max Beckmann in New York

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 The exhibit, “Max Beckmann in New York,” might have been divined by a numerologist. Beckmann, the great German expressionist painter, died 66 years ago on the streets of New York. In late December of 1950, he was on his way from his Upper West Side apartment to the Metropolitan Museum, where his self-portrait was featured in a group show. He succumbed to a heart attack at the entrance to Central Park. He was 66 years old, a coincidence that might have interested the sometimes mystically-inclined painter.

Now the Metropolitan has borrowed that painting, a suave likeness of the artist in a blue dinner jacket, and made it the centerpiece of one of the best shows this year.  It’s a relatively small exhibit — only some 40 works. It never quite lives up to its title, which suggests a rich and significant artistic relationship with a city that was his home for little more than a year, but makes up for it with a selection of earlier paintings that convey the full scope of his genius.

Beckmann was one of those modernist German painters whose works were declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. Stripped of his professorship in Frankfurt, he fled the Third Reich for Holland. This flight was prophetically evoked by his earlier triptych, “Departure,” in which scenes of horrific torture flank a center panel in which a royal family – a crowned king, his wife and child – sail away on a calm blue sea. He came to America after the war, and spent two years teaching in St. Louis before moving to New York in 1949.

After the placid Midwest, the city rejuvenated him. He described it, in a good way, as “a prewar Berlin multiplied a hundredfold.”  His ramblings through Manhattan took him to honkytonk bars, past bowery flophouses, to the Latin Quarter nightclub and often included drinks at the elegant Plaza and St. Regis hotels – all places that provided him with the parade of characters that populate his pictures.

Photographs of him at his teaching job at the Brooklyn Museum Art School show a frumpy looking Beckmann in baggy slacks and a Ralph Cramden-like fedora clamped down on his head. It’s a far cry from the dandyish depictions in his self-portraits, in which he alternately looks a night club promoter, powerful industrialist, a yachtsman on the Italian Riviera and a spy in a trench coat. In all of these depictions, however, Beckmann’s powerful features shine through, a portrait of the artist as an unflinching observer and masterful creator.

Beckmann, thank goodness, was no realist.  His paintings are allegorical, filled with clowns, acrobats, soldiers, queens, and prostitutes. It’s not always clear what he was getting at. Why, for example, were women often rendered as masked giantesses, scantily-dressed Amazons with powerful shoulders and thighs like tree trunks? They are seductresses, yes, but they also look like they could break a man over their knees.

His wife, Quappi (Mathilde), in contrast, is usually the picture of gentle femininity, pretty and smartly dressed, and, as in Beckmann’s self-portraits, holding a cigarette between her fingers. She was 20 years younger than Beckman and lived on in New York after his passing, a promoter and interpreter of her husband’s work until her own death in 1986.

Beckman recognized that America was more puritanical than Europe and sometimes toned down his work to reflect this. The 1950 painting, “Woman with Mandolin in Yellow and Red,” was originally a treatment of the Leda-and-the-swan myth, in which Jupiter, in the guise of a swan, makes love to a young woman. To make it more acceptable here, he painted clothes on the voluptuous figure and, somewhat awkwardly turned the swan into a mandolin so that the reclining woman seems to be taking a break from her playing.  Ironically, the work ended up in a German museum.

 

Probably the most famous of Beckmann’s New York paintings is “Falling Man,” in which an upside-down figure plummets to the ground amid burning skyscrapers.  Of course, it would be impossible not to observe now that such imagery became a reality in Manhattan some 51 years later. But Beckmann’s widow denied that the picture was one of apocalypse, or even, as has often been assumed, a modern day image of Icarus, whose hubris made him soar too close to the sun.

Instead, she said, the painting’s meaning is to be found in the distant winged figures who float by in pink and green boats. They are angels and the falling figure is mortal man, flung down to earth and condemned to live there “with all its horrors and its beauties.” It’s not a bad description of Beckmann’s life and art.  He embraced the full range of human existence. Heaven, for him, would have been unbearably dull.

Picasso’s Sculpture

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As a painter of illusions, Pablo Picasso manipulated form in every possible way. He reduced reality to diagrams, fractured volumes, flattened space, and rearranged the features on the faces of his subjects.

It shouldn’t surprise that he’d be drawn to sculpture, where he could get his hands on the very stuff of matter and bend and twist to his heart’s content.

 

And so he did, as can be seen in an entertaining, sometimes goofy, sometimes dazzling show at the Museum of Modern Art, “Picasso Sculpture.” Here, heroic classical heads coexist with lumpy figures out of a Tim Burton Claymation movie.

One reason you don’t see many Picasso sculptures is that the artist hung on to them, keeping them in his studio like familiars or totemic ancestor figures.  After he died in 1973, most went into the founding collection of the Musee national Picasso-Paris. With loans from there and other collections, MoMA curators have come up with 140 works created between 1902 and 1964.

If cubism’s impossible spatial relationships give you claustrophobia, you may find relief in a three-dimensional piece like “Guitar,” where planes are broken up but the laws of physics prevail. There’s something endearing in this humble cardboard and string construction, as if the great master were making something for a school art fair.

Picasso’s dealer, Daniel Kahnweller, called his wire constructions “drawings in space.” Some have the elegance this suggests. Others look like tangles of coat hangers. Better are the sturdier welded-metal sculptures.  One of these, “Woman in the Garden” from 1930, is a knockout.  It was the last of Picasso’s five unsuccessful submissions for a memorial to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

This is a truly lovely abstraction.  A breeze lifts the woman’s hair and bends the stems of the two oversized flowers. Botanical forms mix with physical ones so that the woman’s torso arches like an unfolding leaf.  The whole of it is painted white, which softens the coldness of the steel. Its only weakness is that it needs to be viewed face on. From the back, it looks like a stage prop held up with struts.

It’s a comical jolt to go from this lyricism to the bulbous-faced sculptures Picasso made at the Chateau de Boisgeloup in the early 1930s. Suddenly, you are in the realm of Mr. Potatohead, and an adults-only Potatohead at that. In these Freudian-surrealistic works, women’s noses resemble drooping phalluses. Other sexual puns abound.

It’s probably a mistake to give such tangible shape to Freudian theory. But Picasso was having fun with the big-nose look, and played around with it in other pieces, including “Head of a Warrior.” This is a reference to ancient sculptures of noble soldiers wearing crested helmets. But Picasso’s cartoonish warrior has bug eyes and the schnoz of a proboscis monkey.

Historians like to point to all the odd materials that Picasso used in this piece, such as the plastered-over tennis balls for the eyes, a crowbar lodged in its neck and a piece of industrial pipe to help prop it up.  There’s a performance aspect to this. The Picasso mystique cast him as a wizard who could pick up an ordinary object, combine it with another thing, slap some clay on it – and – voila! – a work of art.  A few decades later, he would combine a bicycle seat and handlebars to make the head of a bull.

Picasso’s situation in World War II was very strange.  He had been labeled by the Nazis as one of the foremost of the “degenerate” artists.  He had also painted “Guernica,” an attack on fascist atrocities in Spain. And yet, in an act of resistance, he stayed on in occupied Paris where he might have expected persecution and where he couldn’t exhibit. Either he had a protector or the Nazis decided not to make a martyr of such a famous artist.

From the war years comes the grim “Death’s Head,” a charred human skull and “Man with a Lamb,” a sorrowful masterpiece in which human stoicism is belied by the bleating lamb the man holds in his arms.

In the hands of another artist, the lamb might have seemed too cloying, but Picasso had a genius for rendering animals vividly and unsentimentally. That can be seen in “The She Goat,” a bronze which usually occupies MoMA’s garden.  She is graceless and ungainly with her scrawny neck, sloping back, swollen udders and bulging sides.  And yet, she possesses amazing dignity, even a touch of heroism, standing foursquare, as if silently proclaiming “I am here!”

With this piece alone, Picasso would have left his mark on Western sculpture.

Frida Kahlo in the Garden

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It’s no wonder that Frida Kahlo is a cult figure. She has more dimensions than string theory. Do you like stories of people overcoming terrible handicaps? Frida was partially crippled by polio as a child, then suffered unimaginable injuries in a bus accident at age 18. She had lifelong pain and heartbreaking miscarriages that haunted her art.

You like stories of tempestuous romance?  Frida married the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, a compulsive womanizer who had a lengthy affair with her younger sister. Diego and Frida were divorced, but remarried and stayed so until her she died at 47.

You like glamour and fashion?  Diego and Frida romped through international high society, charming everyone with their verve and style.  Frida designed her own clothes, doing variations on traditional Mexican dresses with snug embroidered bodices and long flowing skirts in brilliant colors.

She was a strong-willed feminist who refused to pluck the infamous unibrow that, rendered in numerous self-portraits, became part of her iconic image.

Kahlo was fearless as an artist, a surrealist whose imagery was bizarre even by surrealist standards.  Using dreamlike symbolism, she exposed all her most personal obsessions and passions.  She depicted her indelible attachment to Rivera in “Diego on My Mind,” in which Rivera’s face stares out of her forehead like a third eye.

All this has been treated in books, exhibitions and film. Was there anything new that an art institution could do with Frida Kahlo?  Well, the New York Botanical Garden, of all places, has taken a shot at it with an exhibition about Kahlo’s association with plants:  “Frida Kahlo: Art . Garden . Life.

It’s not as farfetched as it might sound.  Kahlo was fascinated with all aspects of the natural world.  She kept monkeys and other exotic pets.  She grew native Mexican flowers and plants in the garden of La Casa Azul, the blue-walled house where she lived in Coyoacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City.  And certainly she used botanical imagery in her paintings, both naturalistic and surrealistic.

Actualy, it’s not a bad fit for the New York Botanical Garden, an otherwise down-to-earth institution with a penchant for the bizarre when it comes to art.  It is forever doing odd things with plants, from shows devoted to renderings of weird flora by botanical illustrators to the holiday train show with its detailed villages made entirely out of bark, leaves and other crunchy materials and, just last spring, a mannerist-inspired display of grotesque and gigantic face sculptures made from fruits and vegetables.

Compared to some of that, Kahlo doesn’t look all that far out.

The evocation of Kahlo’s gardens in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a grand Victorian greenhouse, is pretty tame. There, you learn that Kahlo liked sunflowers, zinnias and fuschia and see a replica of a centerpiece of Kahlo’s garden, a stepped pyramid on which are arrayed terra-cotta pots filled with Mexican cacti and succulents.

But it lays the groundwork for the display of 14 paintings in the Botanical Garden’s library gallery.

Who knew that Frida Kahlo paid tribute to Luther Burbank, the pioneering American botanist about whom everyone learns in grammar school?  But, of course, she gives the portrait a surrealist tweak, so that Burbank is planted in the ground like a tree, his roots feeding on a buried corpse, a reflection, the wall text helpfully tells you, of Kahlo’s interest in cycles of life and death.

She put a twist on traditional still life compositions – tables covered with such tropical fruits as mangos, guavas, oranges, and bananas– by teasing out sexual shapes from cut-open melons and other seed-laden structures.   In one still life, she planted a small flag in a melon that pays tribute to her dentist, Samuel Fastlicht, one of many medical professionals she befriended in the course of a lifetime of medical treatments.

The masterpiece of the show is one of those Kahlo self-portraits in which she surrounds her realistically rendered face with all manner of symbols. She wears a necklace of thorns that sends droplets of blood down her neck. White moths perch on her hair like hairclips, a black monkey hangs on one shoulder and a black cat on the other, while a dead hummingbird dangles from the thorn necklace.  According to Mexican folklore a dead hummingbird was supposed to entice the wearer’s lost love to return.

The show is a bit thin, not really up to museum standards. But because it’s the New York Botanical Garden, and this is spring, and Kahlo is such a colorful character, it all seems like good fun. Especially when you contemplate all the jolly events and programs the Garden has coaxed out of its subject: “Frida al Fresco” evenings, lectures on Diego and Frida, family scavenger hunts, puppet shows, Mexican films, and “Cooking with Frida.” And don’t forget the gift shop with its Frida Kahlo postcards, scarves, handbags and oven mitts.

 

Degenerate Art

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They came by the thousands, the men in suits, the women in ankle-length dresses and brimmed hats.  They peered somberly at wild primitivist paintings and twisted, expressionist sculptures.  They read wall text that said “This is how sick minds viewed nature,” “An insult to German womanhood,” and “Madness becomes method.” Some, perhaps feeling the need for an antidote to the diseased art, walked across the park to see an exhibit of heroic Aryan realism.

The scene was Munich, the year 1937.  The first exhibit, called Entartete Kunst” or  “Degenerate Art,” ridiculed such artists as Max Beckman, Oskar Kokoschka and George Grosz– all revered today. The other show, the “Great German Art Exhibition,” was curated by a failed realist artist named Adolf Hitler and offered a slew of academic painters who are mostly forgotten today.

Now, Neue Galerie, the Manhattan museum devoted to Austrian and German expressionism, has mounted a show that documents this Nazi war on modernist art.  The Nazis hated many things, but this particular one grew out of theories that compared expressionism and surrealism to the art of the mentally ill. Such art, the Nazis insisted, undermined the sanity of the culture and had to be banned and eradicated.

One of the earliest targets was the famed Bauhaus school of design, whose form-follows-function “International Style,” was said to be overly influenced by Jews and communists. The school was forced to move twice before being closed by the Nazis in 1933.

Hitler’s men also had reason to dislike Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee for his childlike, stick-figure compositions such as “The Twittering Machine,” on view here.  Klee was hounded until he fled for his former Swiss home.  Some 17 of his pieces were seized for the “Degenerate Art” Exhibit.

Klee was more fortunate than the great expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of Die Brucke (The Bridge), a style from Dresden that aimed to bridge modernism and the art of the past. They revived the great German tradition of woodcuts, expressionist versions of which can be seen here.  None of this earned him any points with the Nazis.  Kirchner’s group portrait of Die Brucke captures their strange position in Nazi Germany – they are serious, professorial-looking artists, but painted in a dark purplish palette that conveys something of their subterranean status.

Kirchner’s life was destroyed by the Nazis.  He was forced to resign from teaching in 1933, saw most of his paintings destroyed, and killed himself in exile in 1938.

Kokoschka, who was Austrian, seemingly had the healthiest response to be branded as degenerate.  In the roughly painted “Self-Portrait as a Degenerate Artist,” he looks strong and resolute, much less tormented than the way he usually rendered himself.

The gallery dedicated to the infamous 1937 Munich exhibit is presented as a duel of sorts, with  “degenerate” works on one side and pieces of comparable motifs from the “Great German Art Exhibition” on the other.  On the expressionist side is Beckman’s famous triptych, “Departure,” with its images of dismemberment and torture flanking a panel showing a king on a sea voyage – an apparent allusion to Beckman’s flight from Nazi Germany (he found refuge in America).  Its respectable opponent is another triptych, Adolf Ziegler’s “The Four Elements,” with four comely blonde nudes as allegorical figures representing earth, air, fire and water. The work hung above Hitler’s mantelpiece.

One gallery’s array of empty frames recalls all the confiscated works that are still lost.  These labeled frames were discovered in an abandoned mind, their canvases cut out.  Also in this gallery is ledger showing the disposition of  some 16,000 works confiscated from German museums and collections.  The book is open to a page showing two Max Beckmann works that were sold to the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of four dealers authorized to sell confiscated art to foreign buyers.  In 2012, German authorities seized a cache of art from the Munich apartment of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who had kept the hoard all these years.

Many other works are still unaccounted for today.  Prior to the “Degenerate Art” exhibit, the Nazis seized 5,000 works from some 32 German museums, including 1,052 by Nolde, 759 by Heckel, 639 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and 508 by Max Beckmann.  Some 650 works made it into the infamous 1937 exhibit. Other works were sold into private collections.  When buyers didn’t materialize, the Nazis sometimes made bonfires of the art in order to stimulate demand.

One interesting fact about the “Degenerate Art” exhibit is that it attracted many more people than the show of sanctioned art.  An incredible 2 million people came through between July and November of that year. Only 500,000 went to see the “Great German Art Exhibition.”

 

The Little Prince

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It’s fun to imagine the rejection letters that “The Little Prince” would probably get from publishers today.  Children’s book editors would want to know what “age group” it was for. They’d almost certainly find it too moralistic and much, much too sad for children – especially the Little Prince’s death at the end.  “Suicide by snake bite?  Not for us!”

Defying conventional publishing wisdom, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s heartbreaking fable about an interplanetary traveler who is too pure of heart for this world, sells about a million copies every year – about 140 million in total since it came out in 1943. Written in French, and voted the best book of the 20th Century in France, it may come as a surprise to learn that “Le Petit Prince,” was actually written in New York City.

Not only that, but the original handwritten manuscript has never left Manhattan.  Acquired by the Morgan Library in 1968 from an American friend of the author’s, it can be seen there now in an exhibit titled “The Little Prince: A New York Story.”

The show is proof that the book did not come easily to Saint-Exupéry.  He was already a famous author by this time, having won America’s National Book Award in 1939 for “Wind, Sand and Stars,” a memoir of his flying experiences, but he had never done anything like this.  He was more doodler than artist, and one of his recurring doodles was of a little man who sometimes had wings, sometimes stood on a little planet, and sometimes had thinning hair like the author. The character caught the eye of his publisher’s wife, Elizabeth Reynal, who suggested he make an illustrated book.

Saint-Exupéry had been a pilot in the French Air Force, but came to New York in 1940 with his wife, Consuelo, after France fell to the Nazis. They were welcomed by publishers, Eugene Reynal and Curtice Hitchcock, who helped set the couple up in an apartment on Central Park South.  Depressed and anxious about his country’s occupation and his exile status, he threw himself into “The Little Prince,” often staying up into the wee hours drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and calling friends to read passages on the phone.

Saint-Exupéry also worked on the book in a townhouse on Beekman Place, a summer house in Asharoken on Long Island and at friends’ homes, including the Park Avenue apartment of Silvia Hamilton, whose black poodle served as the model for the story’s sheep.

You can see the coffee stains and cigarette burns on some of the pages put on view, as well as a once-crumpled-up watercolor that was rescued from the trash and flattened out.  Fans of the book will find a great deal of new material, including early drafts, discarded scenes, preliminary sketches and unpublished watercolors.  The original manuscript ran to 30,000 words but was eventually trimmed to less than half of that.

The story begins as the narrator, a pilot who has crashed in the desert (a real-life occurrence for Saint-Exupéry), is desperately trying to repair his plane. He is interrupted by the appearance of the alien traveler, who, in the book’s first turn of whimsy, asks him to draw a sheep.  The elegant little prince wants a grazing animal for his tiny asteroid, which is constantly threatened by sprouts of baobab trees and where his only companion is a vain rose bush with a single flower.

The show has several drawings of the book’s most dramatic image, which shows what happens when the baobabs are allowed to get out of hand.  At first, Saint-Exupéry, showed the tiny asteroid being devoured by the roots of one tree, but he eventually settled on the much better drawing with three.

In his writing, he was as meticulous as a poet, trying out about ten variations on the book’s central aphorism before settling on: “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Saint-Exupéry left New York in April 1943 to rejoin his reconnaissance unit in North Africa just as the first edition of “The Little Prince” hit the shelves of local bookstores.  Before departing he stopped at the apartment of Silvia Hamilton and left a bag containing the material in this show, saying “I’d like to give you something splendid, but this is all I have.”

In July of 1944, he took off from Corsica on a solitary reconnaissance mission over the south of France. Like the little prince, who disappeared without a trace from the Sahara, Saint-Exupery never returned.  His identity bracelet turned up in a fisherman’s net near Marseille in 1998.  You can see it in the exhibit. It displays his name, his wife’s, and the lower Park Avenue address of his American publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock.

 

 

Magritte

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Let me tell you about this cool dream I had.  These men were playing cricket in some sort of park, except the trees in the park looked like giant stair spindles. When the batter hit the ball, a giant sea turtle flew over his head. Except the turtle’s head was a smooth cylinder.  And there was a woman in a box with a gag — or maybe a surgical mask–over her mouth…

Okay, I confess. This isn’t really my dream.  It’s a description of a painting called “The Secret Player” by Rene Magritte, who once said: “Surrealism claims for our waking life a freedom similar to that which we have in our dreams.”

The point I’m trying to make is that most people find their own dreams fascinating, but are bored with those of others. Why? Because most dreams (excepting the occasional Freudian one) are indecipherable and mostly meaningless — especially to outsiders. This poses a challenge for any artist who wants to use dreams as a template for art.

I thought of this at the outset of the Museum of Modern Art’s new show, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938.” The show is about Magritte’s formative – and most creative – years. This is when he did many of his most famous paintings: the lovers with draped heads, the pipe that is not a pipe, the shoes with toes, the half-woman, half-fish.

“The Secret Player” comes from the first half of this show, when Magritte –a conservative artist by surrealist standards ­– was at his most florid and bizarre.  These are the ones that dare you to make sense of their plots. In the elaborately staged “The Menaced Assassin,” a businessman stares dully into a gramophone horn while the nude and bloodied corpse of a woman lies on the divan behind him.  Armed men in bowler hats stand in the wings, ready to rush in, while three other men peer in from the balcony. All are disengaged, as if in a trance.

Magritte gradually settled into his signature style – a plain and meticulous realism. No matter how outlandish the subject, he painted it in his matter-of-fact way.  Thankfully, he also gave up narrative.  In the show’s second half, there are no more plots to puzzle over. His paintings became droll one-liners, snapshots of the weird and the impossible .

A man stands with his back to us, looking into a mirror, but instead of seeing his face, we get the same view of the back of his head.  In “Clairvoyance,” a still life painter contemplates an egg and paints a bird in flight. In “The Portrait,” a slice of meat on a plate looks up with a human eye.

He liked playing games with the female nude.  In one, the artist in the picture paints a real woman into existence, the brush giving her flesh and form.  “The Eternally Obvious” is a suite of five paintings, each a partial view of a nude, but arranged vertically so as to form an almost-complete figure. “Collective Invention,” reverses the usual mermaid convention, putting the fish part on top, with the woman’s legs on the bottom.

Magritte turns philosophical about reality and representation in “The Treachery of Images, which looks like a simple illustration of a tobacco pipe, but with a caption that reads  “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” French for “This is not a pipe.”  In other words, it’s not a pipe, but a painting of one, the kind of trope that would become a staple of conceptual art.

The show ends with the onset of World War II, after which Magritte never regained his creative edge. He did variations on familiar themes but he lived long enough, dying in 1967, to see his fame take off with the pop art frenzy. His personal image as the “the ordinary man in the bowler hat, suit and tie,” struck a chord, as did the painted images of such men coming down from the sky holding their umbrellas.

His images were snatched up for commercial purposes. The floating eye of his painting, “The False Mirror,” became the basis for the iconic CBS logo. A museum show a few years back showcased no fewer than 60 book covers with Magritte imagery.

I doubt his surrealist friends from the 1920s would have approved (the fame-obsessed Salvador Dali excluded).  But the MoMA stops short of all this.  Its subject is a young between-the-wars artist who painted daringly bizarre imagery, who at first immersed himself in incomprehensible dreams.

In the course of the show, he gradually wakes up. He polishes up his messy material. What was once disturbing gets punchier and funnier.  He made incomprehensibility the point and let the audience in on the joke. They have loved him ever since.