21/02/2017

“Max Beckmann in New York” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY


                                                                         





My students, art majors all, have been complaining about the readings I’ve been assigning as of late. These handouts—essays and excerpted vignettes by writers as diverse as Ernst Gombrich, Fairfield Porter, Camille Paglia, and Robertson Davies—are intended to give students an idea of the sweeping nature of art and art-making, both within academia and out in the much vilified “real world.”The point of these readings—or one of them, anyway—is to encourage students to think beyond mere self-expression and underline that, in the end, art achieves its own wily independence. The complaint is that the handouts are dispiriting. This response is prompted, in part, by the dawning realization—a realization that gains in intensity the closer graduation approaches—that the artist’s life is a tough row to hoe. There’s the cost of studio space in New York City, the vagaries of commerce, the niceties of keeping a roof over one’s head and, not least, the state of the world. What is the worth of art in an age of economic freefall, rampant terrorism, unceasing wars, and distracting technologies? Positivity of some sort would seem to be in order.

And then I found just the reading during an attempt at clearing out my bookshelves. Pulling out a dusty copy of Theories of Modern Art, Herschel B. Chipp’s indispensable compendium of statements, manifestos, and observations by artists, critics, and sundry outliers, I opened it to a random page. There I read that “art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement; for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.” The writer continues:

There are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you to decide what is the more important.

What follows is an avowal, albeit a quixotic one, of art’s primacy in the face of devastation—written, no less, by a refugee fleeing a culture upended by a group of demagogues bent on world domination, ethnic purity, and with few qualms about the cost these goals might take in human life. “Human sympathy and understanding must be reinstated . . . in the midst of a boundless world turmoil.” “On My Painting,” a 1938 lecture by the German artist Max Beckmann, carries with it echoes of life, here, in the twenty-first century.





Although Beckmann refused to explain the symbolism of repeated motifs like crowned figures, fish, ladders and brass instruments, he was clear about one issue. He did not believe in complete abstraction, completely flattened forms, or extreme stylization. Although he compressed space, and is said to have had a horror vacui of deep space (based on battlefield trauma of volunteering as a medical orderly during World War I), he insisted on an empathic identification with actual objects, and the depiction of space and air around them.

Beckmann said, “If the canvas is only filled with a two-dimensional conception of space, we shall have applied art, or ornament. To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic.” (Max Beckmann, “On My Painting,” lecture, first read in London, July 21, 1938.) In an earlier essay, he had written, “Quality [is] the feeling […] for the peach-colored sheen of skin, for the glint of a nail, for the sensual in art, which resides in the softness of flesh in the depth and gradation of space, not only on the surface but also in depth.” (Max Beckmann, “Thoughts on Timely and Untimely Art.” In Pan, March 14, 1912.)

Across several countries and decades, he resisted movements that propounded abstraction and pictorial flatness as the apex of painting. He lived in Germany, Amsterdam, and the United States, but he was not an expressionist or pioneer of abstraction like Franz Marc, Kandinsky, or Mondrian, or a New York School Abstract Expressionist. His work was shown in the 1923 exhibition in Mannheim, for which curator Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub coined the movement Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), but Beckmann was never an overt a societal chronicler as peers Otto Dix and George Grosz. His was not an easy position to occupy; he didn’t fit any established art historical narrative.
Beckmann was in some form of exile for most of his life. He had a nervous breakdown after his service in World War I and did not return to family life with his first wife and son. In the 1930s he was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, and was exiled to Amsterdam for a decade. He was never able to penetrate the French art world or the Paris market. He arrived in the United States in 1947, first teaching at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, and then in New York, where he taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.







The Neue Galerie painting is one of seven self-portraits viewers encounter upon entering “Max Beckmann in New York.” As opening gambits go, it’s pretty bracing and divulges a surprising admixture of whimsy and artifice. The earliest self-portraits on display are dated 1923; the last is from 1950, the year of Beckmann’s death at sixty-six. Stylistically, Beckmann moved from softly modeled forms to flattened areas of color held in check by brushy black lines. (With the exception of Matisse, and including Picasso, no other twentieth-century painter employed black with as much dexterity or nuance.) Beckmann is revealed to have been more of a showman than some of us previously thought. Cognizant of the status conferred upon The Artist, Beckmann toyed with its presumptions. Whether donning a sailor suit or what looks to be a pair of pajamas, or even (and this is the giveaway) surrounding himself with circus trappings, Beckmann engages in a hugely underplayed form of self-deprecation. His “disdain for people was considerable,” wrote a journalist taking note of the artist in the early twenties, but “under his prickly shell he concealed a highly vulnerable sensitivity, one that he sometimes mockingly exposed.”

The impetus for “Max Beckmann in New York” is Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket, the afore-mentioned canvas from 1950. Painted during the winter and spring of that year, Beckmann depicted himself as being more vigorous and virile than the rumpled figure seen in photographs of the time. The stony visage and ever-present cigarette we know about, but Beckmann’s torso swells upward like those of the warriors seen on the red Attic vases of ancient Greece, heroic images from which he took inspiration. The painting isn’t without its well-played ironies: an insomniac suffering from heart ailments and given to anxiety should be allowed some license when translating physical frailty into pictorial muscle. Beckmann’s health gave out on the corner of Sixty-ninth Street and Central Park West–he died of a heart attack on the way to see “American Painting 1950,” an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among that show’s featured attractions? Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket. The story is poignant (as Ms. Rewald notes), but am I alone in feeling that the artist might have derived a grim pleasure in its you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up circumstances?


 

Beckmann was in some form of exile for most of his life. He had a nervous breakdown after his service in World War I and did not return to family life with his first wife and son. In the 1930s he was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, and was exiled to Amsterdam for a decade. He was never able to penetrate the French art world or the Paris market. He arrived in the United States in 1947, first teaching at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, and then in New York, where he taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.

It may be inconvenient for art historians, but in his painting, Beckmann never gave us everything; he doesn’t allow us to penetrate meaning that way. It is not an accident that Beckmann loved costumes and guises. His painting is poly-referential, suggestive through form rather than content. Addressing his first class at Washington University in 1947 (an advanced painting class he took over from Philip Guston), Beckmann said:

    Please do remember this maxim – the most important I can give you: If you want to reproduce an object, two elements are required: first, the identification with the object must be perfect; and secondly, it should contain, in addition, something quite different. This second element is difficult to explain. Almost as difficult as to discover one’s self.





His painting “Falling Man” is difficult to explain, which makes it tempting for an art historian to describe it as a foreshadowing of television news images we saw on 9/11. The painting has also been interpreted as an illustration of Beckmann’s spiritual interests. Like other artists of his generation, he was interested in Theosophy, the concept of the fourth dimension, and he studied Indian philosophy and the Vedas. And yes, Beckmann seemed to embrace the idea, as an artist, that he could be a seer and truth-teller. But “Falling Man” is magic by its own internal, impossible contradictions. The legs and feet are oversized, weighty, splayed, taking up a large piece of the upper part of the painting. Clouds are pressed up against the picture plane; they are thick, tangible paint, all about air and atmosphere, yet they are also light enough to pass though the figure and the tall building at the left.

Beckmann’s painting does not position itself on any one side of a polemical position. Rewald refers to “Bird’s Hell” (1938) as his clearest indictment of Nazism. While this is likely true — the painting is full of nightmarish, weird, perverse imaginings – it is still, determinedly, a message told in metaphor: formal and imagistic. Across his entire body of work, Beckmann matches perversity with tenderness, detachment with intimacy, angst and darkness with celebration and rich color.

He loved to paint women and figures with splayed legs – this vision goes all the way back to the 1906 painting “Death Scene,” made in response to the premature death of his mother. Curiously, a female nude squats at the bedside in grief. The squatting or splayed-leg pose is a leitmotif across his triptychs, and it is featured prominently in “Columbine.” But his depictions of his second wife, Quappi, are about wholeness. In a painting like “Quappi in Grey” (1948), her small, delicate features are held together in Beckmann’s hand, and with his line.



Among the most striking aspects of Beckmann’s vision is that, notwithstanding his meditations on human folly and vice, it never descends into nihilism or despair. The paintings bristle and bump with appetite—for life’s absurdities, absolutely, but primarily for life itself. It’s worth mentioning that a number of Beckmann pictures concern themselves with everyday epiphanies—the ocean as seen from a hotel terrace; the forest surrounding a university town; an untended corner of the studio; and his beloved Quappi, whose handsome countenance appears repeatedly in the oeuvre. The center panel of Departure has famously—and rightfully—been cited as a marker of Beckmann’s holistic worldview. Blue skies and family, the painting would seem to suggest, sustain us in the midst of history’s cruelest turns. It’s no surprise that Beckmann disliked being lumped in with the Expressionists: self-pity and narcissism were antithetical to the “fullness, roundness, and the vitally pulsing” to which he aspired. The stern and heady embrace of “essential things” is palpable throughout “Max Beckmann in New York,” and is but one reason we should look to this demanding artist as a guidepost in our troubled times


                                                                                 




Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait with Cigarette” belonged to the Metropolitan Museum until 1971, when its deaccession set off a series of disputes that reshaped museum practices.




Rachel High: As you've just mentioned, the book includes works made by Beckmann while he was living in New York as well as works in New York collections. He didn't live here for very long, but what role did the city play in Beckmann's reception as an artist?

Sabine Rewald: He lived here at the time of the emerging Abstract Expressionist artists. When The Met organized the exhibition American Painting Today, these artists—called "The Irascibles"—wrote a protest letter to the Museum's president because they were enraged that such conservative works were shown. The letter made the front page of The New York Times and a group photograph was later made of them for Life magazine; I illustrate it in my catalogue. Beckmann and the Abstract Expressionists were like ships in the night; he had no idea or interest in what was going on in those circles. He wouldn't set foot in any of the galleries that showed that type of work. Beckmann's work was not much in demand at that time. While he was in voluntary exile in Amsterdam, people admired him for his heroic stance. After a few years in the United States, sales did not go so well. To subsidize his artwork, he taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and, in September 1950, he took on an additional teaching position at an art school at West 130th Street. The job did not last long. The school went bankrupt in mid-November. So, being in New York was more for his mental well-being than for his career.



                                                                       





Rachel High: A common thread in your past publications is that they include excerpts from the artist's letters, journals, and other writings, and this book is no exception. How do Beckmann's writings to help the reader understand him and his work?

Sabine Rewald: His writing sheds not a single light on his paintings. He hated to have to interpret his work. When The Museum of Modern Art was thinking of buying Max Beckmann's first triptych, The Departure, which is in the catalogue and the exhibition, Curt Valentin was asked by director Alfred Barr to ask Beckmann what the painting depicted. Beckmann liked to mingle the metaphysical with realism and people often cannot make head or tail out of what is going on in his paintings. Beckmann retorted, "well, if he wants to know what's going on just tell him to return the picture." He wouldn't descend to give interpretations. Once he said, pointing to the sky, "only he upstairs knows what's going on." He hated when people asked for the meaning.
The Germans invaded Amsterdam in 1940 and Beckmann destroyed his diaries up until that year, so only his diaries from 1940 to 1950 are published. They tell you things of daily life, of people who he met, how many hours he worked, of the weather, and of walks, wherever he went. It is interesting to compare the original diaries to the published text. The published diaries were carefully edited by his wife Quappi, who took out derogatory remarks about those still alive then and references to his frequent visits to the Plaza Hotel for a "recovery drink," or two. His original writings are all in Sütterlin, a type of old German script that was taught in German schools when Beckmann was young. On some of his paintings his signature is in Sütterlin. It's very difficult to read and near impossible for someone who isn't German to understand. I'll tell you, I've never worked on a tougher artist than Beckmann. He's tough.


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