Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German

 

from an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17; and from collections in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago and St. Louis, MO

 

 

2025 is the 100th anniversary of a survey by Gustav F. Hartlaub at the Kunsthalle Mannheim of the work of artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkiet (The New Objectivity).

This was the movement with whose aims Max Beckmann aligned his work after WWI:  social commentary, critical realism, representation of contemporary life.

 

 

Max Beckmann, become gaunt, suffered a fatal heart attack crossing Central Park, NY in December 1950, just after Christmas.  He was going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see hung this, his latest self-portrait.

 

 

Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket, 1950, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German.  St. Louis Art Museum on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016.

 

 

In memory, in 2016, this museum organized a winter exhibition. Included were self-portraits;  interior scenes;  portraits of women and performers; a few landscapes; and two triptychs.

 

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Between 1904 and 1950, the artist produced more than 800 paintings,  prints and drawings and 8 sculptures.

 

His style shifted from the realism and idealism of conventional academic training

 

 

Three Women in a Studio, 1908, oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. St. Louis Museum of Art from whose website this image

 

 

to emotionally dense,  figurative imagery, stuck with symbols and bright with symbolic colours, calling on the history of the West to call out its present to safeguard its future.

 

 

The Bath, 1930, oil on canvas

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. St. Louis Museum of Art from whose website this image

 

 

Beckmann served on the Belgian front as a medical orderly during the Great War. 

1915:  a quote from a letter the artist wrote from there:

 

“Yesterday I was off duty.  Instead of going on some short trip or other, I plunged like a wild man into drawing and made self-portrait (sic) for seven hours.  I hope ultimately to become ever more simplified, ever more concentrated in expression, but I will never – this much I know – give up fullness, roundness, the vitally pulsating.  Quite the contrary, I want to intensify it more all the time – you know what I mean by intensified roundness; no arabesques, no calligraphy, but rather fullness and plasticity.”

 

 

Fullness, roundness and plasticity, simplification and concentrated expression and vitality it was throughout the evolution of his style over the 35 years which remained to him.

 

The experience  of war broke the artist.

1915: he had a nervous breakdown and was discharged.

He realized that he could not funnel his experience of war into his painting in the same way as he used the visits which he relished to the bars, carnivals, circuses, restaurants: accumulating images and studying the relationships between people.

 

War was a singular experience which the artist absorbed and translated into a singular style: modernist with a visible medieval ancestry; expressionism with its sources not inside him but inside the world which had created so much violence and sorrow.

He said that wanted to help people figure out how to live with each other. 

 

The first painting he executed after his treatment ended was this:

 

 

Descent from the Cross, 1917, (with light interference), oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. MOMA, NY

 

 

 

 

Self-portrait in pen and black ink on paper, 1917. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

1920’s: Beckmann, who had distanced himself from the Expressionists with their emphasis on mystery, emotion and the interior life, associated himself with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) tendency. 

 

He and his colleagues wanted to depict the instability of Germany after World War I. 

While he drew from the suffering, despair and the social injustice of post-war society, he also painted portraits and scenes from his favourite venues.

 

 

 

Family Portrait, 1920, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. MOMA, NY

The artist’s own family.

 

Beckmann loved places where people congregate using one or other of their many personae: beaches, bars, restaurants, carnivals, circuses, vaudevilles, masked balls.

 

 

 

Still Life with Gramophone and Iris, 1924, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German.  In a private collection, NY and displayed in 2016 at the Metropolitan Museum, NY.

The inscription on the dark red Bohemian glass says ‘In Memory of Frankfurt’.

 

 

 

 

Galleria Umberto, 1925, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016/17

The artist visited Naples in 1925 and made studies inside the Galleria Umberto

 

 

 

 

Variété, 1927, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. ?Location

 

 

 

 

Masquerade, 1948, oil on canvas

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. St. Louis Museum of Art from whose website this image

 

 

 

During the late 1920’s, Beckmann’s work became widely known and his reputation reached a pinnacle of approbation in Europe.

 

 

 

The Old Actress, 1926, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

 

 

 

 

Quappi in a Blue Boat, 1926 and 1950, gouache and oil on paper mounted on board. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Wurth Collection, Kunzeslau loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

 

The artist married his second wife, Mathilde (Quappi) von Kaulbach, an opera singer, in 1925.

 

 

1933: Not long after Hitler’s ascension to power, Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching post in Frankfurt. His paintings were removed from display in German museums.  They were deemed to be unsupportive of Nazi goals.

 

 

 

Bathing Scene, 1934, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

When the Nazi’s fired him from his professorship in Frankfurt, Beckmann began his first triptych.  It was completed after the artist had returned to Berlin.

 

July 1937, the artist and his wife left Germany for the Netherlands one day after the opening by the Nazi authorities of  ‘Degenerate Art’.  Hitler had called for war on modern art for what he called its inaccessibility, elitism and internationalism.

21 of Beckmann’s works were included in this exhibition.  More than 500 of his paintings and prints were removed from exhibitions.

 

 

 

Departure triptych, 1932, 1933-35

Beckmann refused to assign political meaning to this triptych which has come to be seen as a commentary on Nazi atrocities. 

The artist compared the work to a miraculous holy picture, a teller of truths difficult to put into words. 

 

Departure, 1932-1935, oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. MOMA, NY from whose website this image.

 

 

Departure:  The Castle

In the left panel, a torture chamber.

 

 

 

Departure:  The Homecoming

The central panel portrays the possibility of being saved from the hells depicted in the right and left panels. 

The king is the fisher king of Arthurian legend.  He confers a blessing. The queen is carrying a small child.

Of these two, the artist said:  “The King and Queen have freed themselves…The Queen carries the greatest treasure – Freedom – as her child in her lap. Freedom is the one thing that matters:  – it is the departure, the new start.” 

The identity of the third hooded man is not clear but it could be Parsifal because it was Parsifal who finally came up with the correct question to ask the King. This exchange led to the healing of the King’s wound  which had paralyzed him for some time. 

Beckmann referred, in a separate context, to the ‘soul wound’  of his experience in WWI.

It is also possible that the knight is holding the King’s helmet, restored with the restoral of kingly functions.

In this image of the King, he is touching a net full of fish which may denote that his healing and his imminent freedom has returned him to the fecund power of kings.

 

 

 

Departure:  The Staircase: right panel

Another torture chamber with a drummer and a bellhop incongruously present also. Staircases denote a way out, a way to freedom. 

In this image, a blindfolded man, carrying a fish (mystery) cannot work out how to free the woman so that they can escape.

 

Departure, 1932-1935, oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. MOMA, NY

 

 

 

Max Beckmann and his wife stayed for 10 years in the Netherlands, unable to get a visa for the United States.  The artist, forbidden to sell his work, relied on the generosity of a few patrons.  

 

 

Birds’ Hell, 1938, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. On loan from a private collection to the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 2016/17

 

The artist was in Paris when he painted this.  It is believed to be an attack on the violence of National Socialism.

Here anthropomorphic birds are together in a candlelit room.

At the center, a monstrous blue figure with many breasts is no sooner out of its shell than it  has an arm raised in a ‘Sieg heil’ salute. Others copy it.

One bird is carving lines into the back of a hog-tied man. Everything is sharp-angled.

 

 

 

 

Hot Springs at Abano, 1939, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, promised gift.

 

 

 

 

Still Life with Large Shell, 1939, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Baltimore Museum of Art

 

 

1947: the artist left Europe for St. Louis, Missouri, at whose Washington University  art school he had been invited to teach in the temporary absence of Philip Guston (1913-1980, American born Canada).

 

It was in St. Louis that Beckmann had his first retrospective (1948) and it was here that he acquired his first American patron, Morton D. May, whose collection forms the heart of St. Louis Art Museum’s (largest single) Beckmann collection.

 

During the summers, the artist taught in Oakland, California, and Boulder, Colorado, and relished the opportunity to tour the western American countryside. 

 

 

 

San Francisco, and detail, 1950, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

The artist’s only painting of an American city.

 

 

 

1949, Beckmann obtained a teaching post at the art school of Brooklyn Museum, New York and he and his wife moved to New York. 

1950, two days after Christmas, the artist died. 

 

 

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The artist’s work had, prior to a 2003 retrospective in London, Paris and New York, been received with ambivalence in New York. 

 

The degree of the New York ambivalence is pointed up by a decision by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of contemporary art, Henry Geldzahler, (1935-1994,  American born Belgium)  to deaccession and sell three of this artist’s works in 1971 in order to buy a sculpture by David Smith (American sculptor, 1906-1965).

 

This ambivalence was rooted in the stylistic and subject matter decisions which Beckmann had made shortly after WWI. 

 

He was running up against the spirit and practice of the times.  With open eyes and with determination. 

 

From the end of WWI onwards, Beckmann, bypassing the artistic experimentation of the times, worked out his own pictorial language.

 

He was never a signed-up member of any group and he derided the work of the acknowledged giants of his age: Matisse and Picasso.

 

Of  Cézanne – who succeeded in the discipline of overvaulting the old boundaries of Western art without entering into abstraction – Beckmann was very respectful. Also of Vincent van Gogh, Lovis Corinth and Edvard Munch.

 

He himself rejected abstraction and said that abstraction underlies everything and does not need to be outed.

 

Disliking the moniker ‘expressionist’, Max Beckmann called his own style ‘transcendental objectivity’.   He wanted, he said, to transfer the magic of real life onto his canvases.

 

 

 

Magic Mirror, 1946,  handcoloured lithograph. 

 Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Kunstahalle Bremen. Photo from the web

 

 

 

The artist returned to a much earlier time in the Western tradition:  to stained glass; religious motifs; the Arthurian romances; and to motifs which come from classical Greece. 

 

He used the same symbols again and again: water, staircase (a route out, away to freedom), wheel, crown (which may stand for the guiding function of artists), fish (this stood for mystery), musical instruments (this may stand for the capacity of our tools to enlarge our senses), lit candles, swords.

 

Journeys, as a metaphor for the testing and maturing and measurement of our lives, were important for the artist.

 

His people stand, sit and lie and fall very close to one another, packed together. Some are tied physically to one another.

But in most of his paintings, each character is emotionally isolated.

 

 

The Artists with Vegetables, 1943. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis University. Photo from the net

 

Painted during exile in the Netherlands, this image includes the painter and three known intellectuals and painters. 

Beckmann’s is the only figure not lit by the candle.  He is holding a cigarette and a mirror in which is a distorted clown face.  The others are holding food, symbol of their survival. Each is in his own world dealing with what to think and how to keep on going.

 

 

From his chosen, self-appointed position on the Western art trajectory, Beckmann struck out into the murderous chaos of the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Among friends and family and performers of all kinds, he reimagined the archetypes of Arthurian legend and Greek myth as though they live and act among us still.

 

Paintings and prints on Biblical themes are addressed on their own canvases.

 

 

 Adam and Eve.  Details TBD

 

 

The stories he depicted are allegories:  open-ended and packed tight between the reality of his time, his imagination, his dreams and fears; and myth.

His aim he said was to try to clarify how we can manage our relationships with each other.

 

 

 

 

Falling Man, 1950, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Icarus, or we, falling for our hubris.

 

 

 

Max Beckmann, who made himself knowledgeable in the art of Africa and Oceania, was a thorough-going Westerner.

 

This fraction of a story comes from that of Parsifal ( he who pierced the veil), a knight of King Arthur’s Roundtable  who became, at length and after many journeys, Grail King.  This was told by the German Wolfraum von Eschenbach (died c. 1220):

 

…in the pursuit of the Holy Grail, the Knights of the Round Table were to quest alone.  Further they were to rely on their own intuition because tradition and convention would trip them up.

 

 

 

The King, 1933, 1937, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Saint Louis Art Museum

 

The woman in the lower left front is the artist’s wife, Quappi. 

It is not clear who is the dark shadow figure behind the King.  But he is pointing backwards and over his shoulder with one hand; and with the other signaling to Quappi to stop.  She is looking backwards, perhaps at her receding homeland.  As is the King.

The blackening of the outlines is thought to be related to the artist’s depression on the verge of his exile in 1937.

 

 

King Arthur’s knights were not living at a time of me-first, me-only.  They acted communally as required in all pre-modern societies. This sentence by Eschenbach summoned a new world in which the West continues to live.

 

 

Max Beckmann never gave up representation or figuration. 

He never gave up on the guiding moral authority of the three sources of our civilization:   classical Greece; the Arthurian romances; and Christianity (even if the Great War had made him very angry with God.  In 1919, Beckmann wrote, “My pictures are a reproach to God for all that he does wrong.”)

 

 

 

 

The Town (City Night), 1950, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Saint Louis Art Museum on loan to the Metropolitan Musuem of Art, NY in 2016 

 

The artist’s wife said that this scene is a cavernous bar.  The nude woman is a symbol of innocence and beauty and naivety.  Around her are creatures representing prostitution, blindness, vulgarity, poverty and greed.  The big city.

 

 

 

He completed ten triptychs – an old Christian  altar format – where he told stories, using myths and symbols, about human issues.  

 

 

 

 

Two triptychs: Departure and Arrival

 

 

Beckmann expected viewers to understand the symbols he used. Until he realized that it was only a minority of people who could. 

 

To this day, a wall note at the Baltimore Art Museum describes the artist’s mythological references as ‘obscure’.  They are not obscure but they are more and more unfamiliar because their related stories are not formally taught any more.  Nor much Latin and Greek.

 

Max Beckmann was not a modern in the way of the German Expressionists, of Dada, the Symbolists, the Surrealists, of Matisse or Picasso or of the New York School, of the conceptualists etc.

 

He did not reject his civilization.  On the contrary, he searched for sustenance from it and refashioned it for the experiences of his life.

 

 

Following his own path cost Max Beckmann.

It cost him in Nazi persecution which followed him to the Netherlands; in a contribution to ill health and early death; and in a judgment of American art cognoscenti in the New York art establishment who,  for decades, decided that Max Beckmann was passé.  But for the nagging business of the artist’s high European pre-Nazi reputation, almost dead, as it were, on arrival in New York.

 

The source of the New York ambivalence in the reception of Max Beckmann’s work is that he was not with the times in terms of his style: he went his own way which was going backwards to move forwards.  He was sui generis. 

 

The New York art world in which the artist landed was in the grip of the Abstract Expressionists who had a hold on artistic representation and rewards in the United States for a generation after 1945.

 

When Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol began to break their hold to seduce us into brave new worlds, Max Beckmann had been dead already 15 years.  Nor has figuration returned to a primary position.

 

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Self Portraits

Max Beckmann created more than 80 self-portraits. This was an aspect of his program of self-knowledge.

Self-actuation was important to him.  He often portrayed himself in costume: maybe he was trialing versions of the presentation of self.

 

(As an aside): hands

I don’t know why so many of the artist’s hands are so big. Big, wonderful, creative, Sapiens hands.  They may be a symbol of an autonomy and  creative action which drove the artist.

 

 Self-Portrait in Tails, 1937, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. The Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

 

Self-Portrait on Yellow Ground with a Cigarette, 1923, oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. MOMA, NY 

 

 

 

 

Self-Portrait in front of a Red Curtain, 1923, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17.

The artist has posed himself as though he were a manger of a nightclub in the Berlin of the 1920s.

 

 

 

 

Self Portrait with White Hat, 1926, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection on loan to the Metropolitan Museum, NY in 2016/17

 

 

 

 

Self-Portrait, 1927, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

 

 

 

Self-portrait, 1938, gouache. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY

The artist is wearing the kind of cap with a visor which used to be worn by professions who spent their time poring over small print.

 

 

 

 

Self-portrait with Horn, and detail, 1938, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Loaned by the Neue Gallerie, New York and a private collection to the Metropolitan Museum, NY in 2016/17

 

 

 

 

Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1947, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Museum von Ostwall, Dortmund on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016/17

 

 

 

 

Portraits of Others

 

 

Quappi in grey, 1948, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

 

The artist’s last painting of his second wife, Mathilde (Quappi) von Kaulbach to whom he was married for 25 years.  She died in New York in 1986 after dedicating her life to her husband’s legacy.

 

 

 

 

The Bark, 1926, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016 

An evocation of the artist’s honeymoon with Quappi in Italy in 1925

 

 

 

 

Alfi with a Mask, 1934, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY

 

 

 

 

Vaudeville Act (Quappi), and detail, 1934, 1937, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY 

 

 

 

 

Quappi with White Fur, 1937, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016/17. 

The artist’s depiction of glamour shortly after he and his wife fled to Amsterdam where all glamour for them ended.

 

 

 

 

The Oyster Eaters, 1943, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17  

The artist’s family on a visit to Italy

 

 

 

 

Parisian Society, 1925, 1931,1947, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

 

 

 

 

Female Head in Blue and Grey, 1948. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection. Photo from a 2003 catalogue of the artist’s work

 

 

 

Other Subjects

 

 

Woman with Mandolin in Yellow and Red, oil on canvas, 1950. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich on loan in 2016/17 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY   

An x-ray showed a painting of Leda and the Swan which the artist overpainted for fear of American prudishness.

 

 

 

 

Backstage, 1950, oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016/17 by the state museum of art in Frankfurt, Germany

 

 

 

 

Sculpture Studio, 1950, oil on canvas.

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY by the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich 

 

 

 

 

Optician’s Window, and detail, 1950, black ink and pastel on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Wurth Collection, Kunzeslau loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016 

The only painting of a New York street

 

 

 

 

Mill in a Eucalyptus Forest, 1950, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

A rare landscape painting

 

 

 

 

Carnival Mask, Green, Violet and Pink (Columbine), oil on canvas, 1950. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Saint Louis Art Museum loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

The explicit sexual pose of this woman has been interpreted both as that of a goddess of sex and death; and as that of a manipulated puppet.

 

 

 

 

Dancer with Tambourine, 1946, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Private collection on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 2016/17

 

 

 

 

Plaza (Hotel Lobby), 1950, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. Albert-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in 2016/17

A favourite watering place of the artist and his wife was the Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court, NY 

 

 

Triptychs

 

 

 

Beginning and Departure:  two triptychs on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016

 

 

Beginning

 

Beginning, 1946-49, oil on canvas,

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY from whose website this image

An autobiography.  Each panel revolves around the artist as a boy: an imagination mixed with a reality.

 

 

In the left panel, a child looks out of a window at an organ grinder and the world surrounding him.

 

 

 

 

The central panel has a young boy in military dress galloping on a rocking horse. In the middle ground the boy’s grandmother is reading a newspaper. 

The boy’s parents are on the steps looking around anxiously.

A second woman is reclining in the foreground, blowing bubbles. 

A clown is hiding in the cupboard. The room is tight and crammed with memories.

 

 

 

 

The right panel shows the young Beckmann in profile looking around.  He is in a classroom filled with students with a teacher at the front of the class.  Two boys pass around a drawing in the foreground.

This scene was inspired by an episode from Beckmann’s youth in which he was reprimanded for passing drawings to his friends in class.

Beginning, 1949, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

 

 

 

The Three Argonauts triptych was completed on the day the artist died.

Touched my heart. Freedom; order; justice obtained after a long and difficult journey.

 

 

The Argonauts, 1950, oil on canvas. 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC from whose website this image

 

The Argonauts were a group of 50 young men who accompanied the Greek hero, Jason, on an adventure whose aim was to find the golden fleece, a prize which his usurping uncle told him would be necessary before he would return the throne to Jason, the rightful heir. 

In this Jason was successful.

 

In the right panel, the 3 Argonauts are being accompanied by a choir, as in Greek theater.  Giving context and explaining, directing the audience’s attention.

 

 

 

In the center panel, the old man is showing the young men the path of life. He has just finished chanting the Odyssey – heartland Western myth of a man’s dangerous journey from the work of his life and then back to his home – and has laid down his harp.

An owl sits on the wrist of one: the owl, undoubtedly of Athena.  It represents knowledge and wisdom.

 

 

Detail of right panel

The artist single-mindedly continues his work. A mask reminiscent of the many the artist saw in his researches in African and Oceanian art – is being used as a stool. 

 

The Argonauts, 1949/50, oil on canvas. 

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

Max Beckmann, a gifted artist whose early work made him a very successful insider during the Weimar Republic, found himself an outsider in occupied Holland; outsider and marginal again as a European in an American art scene dedicated to non-representational art.

The ancient Greeks and Christianity, however, remain with us in our deep and our shallow ground.  As to the holy grail, North Americans adapted the search for it to the injunction of their own Constitution: to seek out, each person, his or her own happiness. (Perhaps to the detriment of their society).

 

If the example of the courage and integrity of Beckmann’s work and life are not enough, his art remains essential to us for as long as the sources of our culture hold.

 

He is the colossus who accompanies us.  One of the guardians and exemplars of a tradition which he modernized and which can heal our self-inflicted wounds if we learn how to live together. 

 

 

 

The Dream, 1921, oil on canvas

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950, German. St. Louis Museum of Art from whose website this image

The staircase is a symbol for a route up and out to freedom.    The only character with eyes open is the young girl in the center of the canvas, carrying a Pulcinello doll. 

This canvas depicts the chaos of Germany in 1921 and the will to escape to freedom.

 

 

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There can barely be a figurative artist working since Beckmann’s time, who has not been influenced by him.    

Here is one of the most skilled inheritors of the mantle:

 

Judith Schaechter, American born 1961, works in glass: stained, cut, sandblasted, engraved, painted and fired. 

Pulling her subject matter from the same deep well as Max Beckmann, she is one of the most skilled of contemporary artists among those whom he has undoubtedly influenced.

 

 

The Battle of Carnival and Lent, 2011

Judith Schaechter, American born 1955. Exhibited in Philadelphia in 2015