Max Beckmann - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by Harry Cooper

MOMA QNS, NEW YORK

"Curious that in every city I bear the lions roaring," Max Beckmann noted in his diary in 1947, a few days after reaching New York from Amsterdam, where he had spent the war years in exile from his native Germany. Whatever the remark means, it reminds us that Beckmann loved the circus and identified with the big cats. In his 1940 painting In the Circus Wagon, two soulful tigers cower in a cage while a stern Beckmann, centered in the blaze of a lamp, reads the paper and hunkers over his own prey, an odalisque in pink resembling his wife. He dares the tigers to interrupt him, but he wouldn't be half so macho without that nearby tamer keeping guard in his impressive uniform. It's Beckmann's classic persona, growling and grimacing and mocking himself all the while.

Beckmann is back at MOMA after almost forty years, and this time it took a team of curators to tame him: Robert Storr of NYU and formerly of MOMA, Sean Rainbird of Tare Modern, and Didier Ottinger of the Centre Pompidou. The exhibition, wisely reduced from its Paris size and hung generously and simply (though without much in the way of storytelling or even simple divisions), presents nearly seventy paintings in twelve rooms, a good sampling of graphic work, and a few sculptures. It is content to sample Beckmann's various modes (except still life, virtually absent) without exhausting any of them, or us.

Seeing this artist in retrospect raises a question: How could a painter who started out and ended up so very bad--and I don't mean good, avant-garde bad, I mean bad bad--get so very good? Beckmann crafted some of the most memorable visual conundrums of the past century and a string of masterful self-portraits, but getting to them can be heavy weather.

The exhibition starts with The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912, the biggest canvas in the show and a real disaster. About one hundred figures flounder in a greasy green soup, clinging to lifeboats and to a total misunderstanding of the marine paintings of Manet and Delacroix. It got mixed reviews at the 1913 Berlin Secession, but it was Beckmann's pride and joy. Elsewhere in the room the shades of Vuillard, van Gogh, Hodler, and Corinth (Beckmann was borrowing right and left) try to swim as far from the wreckage as possible. Only The Street, 1914, oddly absent from the catalogue, offers a hint of greatness to come. Probably painted on the eve of war, it shows the bowler-hatted artist rising from a vertically compressed crowd that includes his wife, his son, and a horse. And the only reason it works is that, in 1928, Beckmann cut it down from a much larger canvas.

The war nearly destroyed Beckmann the man, who saw the worst of it as a volunteer nurse and orderly, but it saved Beckmann the artist, giving locus to his ungainly mix of avant-garde ambition and academic training. "My art can gorge itself here," he wrote to his wife, Minna, from the front lines in April 1915. By July he'd had something like a nervous breakdown. With a leave of absence in October, he settled in Frankfurt, where he recovered and started a new life away from his family in Berlin.

Now he focused on making prints of war scenes and deformed veterans a la Grosz; the few paintings from this time depict religious subjects and mix the hysterically twisted figures of Grunewald with (to my eye anyway) the rambling structure of Kandinsky's then-new Compositions. Three of these strange works are included here, but a fourth, Resurrection, 1916, is regrettably absent. True, it wouldn't have been easy to include such a huge picture (bigger than The Sinking of the Titanic). But it's intriguing that Beckmann, who seldom had finishing anxiety, kept this incomplete work on view in his studio for years, as if to warn against the pitfalls of the multifigure allegory that would become his grail.

Having got the explicitness of both world war and Christianity out of his system, Beckmann hit his stride with a single work, The Night, 1918-19. A powerfully impacted scene of domestic violence (think A Clockwork Orange), The Night employs a restrained palette mad a coarse-grained cubist space whose large fragments create surface tension without sacrificing legibility. Here Beckmann invented several things that stuck: a way of building the composition from the figures themselves, who, like the beams and struts of all old mine, support the rectangle of the canvas; an elusive kind of storytelling that adds up visually but not quite narratively; and a vocabulary of obsessional objects--candles, horns, jutting elbows, soles of feet, theater stages, and mullioned windows, to be joined in later works by cigarettes, newspapers, flying fish, crystal balls, stringed instruments, succulent plants, ladders, swords, and dinner jackets. The problem with hitting one's stride so early (Beckmann was not yet thirty-live) is that there is nowhere left to go. While Beckmann's space contracted and expanded after The Night, his compositional and narrative formulas never really changed again.