Max Beckmann,
at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Summer 2003.
The only thing available to us is the reality of our dreams in images.
—Diary, 1946
All his working life, Max Beckmann read literature and philosophy, but I don’t suppose he knew Hamlet’s remark, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.” It fits Beckmann’s enterprise. His art was never tentative or discreet, but it’s rich with uncertainty and ambiguity. He articulated a century’s historical realities with imagery crashing through garishly lit middle zones between nightmare and wakefulness. Whatever the subject—anecdote, portrait, still life, landscape, conversation piece—he charged it with event-consciousness. Picture-making wasn’t just an art practice, it was spiritual record-keeping. (He kept other sorts of records, too, in the form of diaries, letters, essays, and addresses.) The infinity of space terrified him. Non-illusionist pictorial space—nonce space—wasn’t just a modern painterly problem, it was a physical reality that might have imbedded or encoded in it a transcendent reality; it was, at the least, a medium for the desire for some kind of transcendence. Contracting depth and volume into two dimensions gave Beckmann momentary solace and equilibrium when confronting what he called “the great void and uncertainty of the space that I call God.”
One can be new…based on the old laws of art: plasticity in the plane.
—Letter, 1922
Art historical alignments are hard to dislodge. An article on Beckmann a few months ago in the New York Times called him an Expressionist. The same newspaper called him the same thing in 1939. Beckmann detested Expressionism, calling it “a decorative and literary matter,” an affectation that rushed into quasi-abstract forms—he had Nolde and Marc in mind—an emotionality unmediated by reason and by the deliberations of pictorial structure. He was consistent in his disapprobation. He didn’t like Gauguin and famously disliked Matisse because they painted “flat,” screen-ish, and retreated from the big-boned, voluminous picture-making he aspired to. Beckmann’s formal restlessness was certainly brawnier and more weighted by the experience of history. If you look at Small Death Scene, though, which owes much to Munch, whom Beck-mann esteemed, you understand the Expressionist claims. Several streaky, quivering figures gathered inside and outside a death room act out attitudes of grief: paralyzed reserve, shrieking sorrow, hysterical fatigue. In a picture like this, he’s closer to Soutine and Kokoschka (though cannier and more diverse), who like him are penned up as Expressionists because there’s nowhere else to put them. Beckmann began as a history painter with the oversized, ambitious The Sinking of the Titanic, a 1912 picture modeled after Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. It’s specific anecdote rendered as world panic. Several lifeboats, boiling up the high space of the picture, pitch sickeningly in sight of the iceberg and ship that float high in the composition. Beckmann was twenty-eight at the time and the picture’s massive busyness is pure bravura—but the action, with those churned-up pouches of anguished, despairing castaways, is merely stated, not poured into image-life. By contrast, another early, smaller canvas, The Street, which like The Sinking of the Titanic renders a particular place in time (Berlin, 1914) crams into a stage-set space a cluster of figures—poor woman, rich woman, young child, baby, Beckmann himself, horse and driver—with a formal explosiveness, rocky with local detonations, missing from the bigger picture.
Gauguin was not capable of extracting from our own time—murky and fragmented though it may be—types that might be for us, the people of the present, what the gods and heroes of past peoples were for them.
—”Thoughts on Timely and Untimely Art,” 1912
He developed a set of types which played out the experience of history as terror: Adam and Eve, monarch and soldier, murderer and murdered, leader and lackey, torturer and victim, stage manager and actor, concierge and bellboy, ringmaster and clown, and the manipulated self—his in the self-portraits. Experience shaped his passion. In 1914 he enlisted as a medical orderly in the German army. He saw and ministered to many bad things and, after a nervous breakdown in 1915, was discharged. He became famous during the Weimar years and was considered by some the most important artist of his generation. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was fired from a teaching position in Frankfurt and soon his work, like so much modern art, was under attack by National Socialism. In 1937, living in Berlin, Beckmann was included in the regime’s “Degenerate Art” exhibition. He’d already been anticipating the world trouble Hitler would make, so he fled with his wife to Amsterdam and lived there until 1947, when he emigrated to America, first to St. Louis then to New York, where he died in 1950. Beckmann was a city man, born in Leipzig, trained in Frankfurt, spending frequent chunks of time in Paris; his idea of “the South” was Genoa (he made a stupendous, ominous nocturne of its harbor and train station). But in a sense it didn’t matter where he found himself. “In every city,” he wrote in his 1947 diary, “I always hear the lions roar!” He never much cared for the company of artists, but he was especially isolated in Amsterdam, spending longer hours than usual in his studio, an old tobacco storeroom. He went from being a celebrity, one friend said, to someone the Dutch didn’t want to know about. It was during these years that he called his art a form of self-hypnosis, and the figures that populate his more bloodily discordant pictures do seem an induced rather than invented phantasmagoria. He said many times that he wasn’t a political man, but he had a signature vision of historical reality. His artistic heroes after World War I, when his figuration becomes hard-angled and space seems a suffocating affliction invented by unfriendly gods, were late Gothic masters of the suffering flesh—Grünewald, Gabriel Mäleskircher, and Bruegel. The gaunt angularity of anatomy and scene in two religious pictures from 1917—Descent from the Cross and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery—puts a hard-cornered, jackknifing pressure on the picture space, and the stiffness of mass becomes part of his expanding idiom.
My aim is to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting-to make the invisible visible through reality…which forms the mystery of our existence.
—”On My Painting”
There’s some fog and bluster in Beckmann’s reflections-he picked up bits of vocabulary from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hume-but there are real parallels between what he said and what he did. In “On My Painting” and other writings, he talks about the self as the object of our journey in life and art. The self is “the great veiled mystery of the world,” and for this reason Beckmann pursued the idea of self-realization of “the so-called whole Individual” in his work. The self, as I understand it here, is the entity constructed from appearances and from the inner life, formed by experience, historical consciousness, self-awareness, and memory. It’s the subject of the work I most admire, the self-portraits. Last summer’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art began with a series of these on paper from different periods. In 1911, he’s Max the Mysterious, glaring out from a heavily crosshatched black aura. “You are in my power,” it says. (“But you are not getting sleepy.”) A 1916 drypoint with a lacy nervous line presents the self in visionary disarray. It’s one of Beck-mann’s purest expressions of fertile uncertainty. In 1921, he comes off as a successful Thomas Mann-like bourgeois artist, complete with bowler hat and mildly arrogant glance. In 1946, he’s the complete artist, mature of physical form, wearing a beret, completely inside himself, the aging body housing awareness of the best and worst of human action. The painted self-portraits are even more responsive to inflections of self. In an early postwar picture of himself at the easel, wearing a red scarf, he has that lean and hungry and neurosthenic look, as if recording bad nerves directly onto the canvas, against which he seems to be leaning for support. Like Rembrandt, he costumes himself-as a sailor (with speedy, dashing effects), a swell in a tux (the paint very constructed), an aristocrat in tails (with a classic transparent “skin”), and—in the picture I’m most mad about—a carnivalesque figure in a wildly striped orange-and-black dressing gown, which might be mistaken for a commedia dell’arte costume, peeking and frowning from behind a brass horn. He’s following the rules great artists live by: surprise art by surprising yourself; push back at what you know how to do; keep changing. The 1938 horn picture surprises with dashing flicked grace notes of color, racy passages, and underpainting that lets Beckmann build up unusually crusty surfaces with dusty tints. He’s the artist as self-impersonator, the clarion-caller pausing before or after the blast, casing reality, looking suspiciously at our selves, a roustabout angel who brings us the best and worst news.
I have tried to realize my conception of the world as intensely as possible.
—”On My Painting”
His cities roared at him, and he roared back in The Night (1918-1919). A cluttered-attic interior bursts with a horrible, funhouse pile-up of agonies. A burly mustachioed ruffian holds the woman he’s abducting like a piece of stiff cardboard scenery. A barely visible peasant type is hanging from the rafters a man whose gaping mouth seems to be wailing a “why-are-you-doing-this” to such irrationality. A well-dressed barefoot clerk whose head is bandaged twists the hanging man’s arm while smoking a pipe. A nearly naked woman, the central figure, her back turned toward us, hands bound to a window, splays her legs helplessly. Her shape is all hopeless, deflated resistance and violability. Scholars offer allegorical readings of this picture and the later, more complicated triptychs, but I take Beckmann at his word when he says that many of his figures have a wobbling ambivalence filled out by viewers who should be guided in understanding, he said, “by their own inner light.” My inner light makes this picture a comically horrific gang portrait of unreason. The awfulness and tortures are presented as simply things that happen to be happening. At the time, there was certainly sufficient grimness to go around. Georg Grosz and Otto Dix both responded to a comparable order of Northern Euro-pean experience during and after World War I, but they were satirists whose surgical instrument was the line. Beckmann’s painting is a criticism of life, not the local criticism of satire. What separates him not only from his equally worldly contemporaries but from every other major twentieth-century artist is the hoarse bass drone of world sorrow throughout his work, even when the pictures squirm with horror-show high jinks.
I try to capture the terrible, thrilling monster of life’s vitality and to confine it, to beat it down and to strangle it with crystal-clear, razor-sharp lines and planes.
—”A Confession,” 1918
One of my favorite paintings in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is Beckmann’s 1938 Woman at her Toilette, With Red and White Irises. A heavy-hipped woman in negligee bends over a vase of flowers, washing her hands. It’s packed tight with specific excitements. The graceful but inexorable gravity of the woman’s mass, bulked out with the classical rotundity Beckmann had mastered in beach pictures and nudes of the late 1920s, meets resistance from the blooming irises and other v-shapes repeated in the woman’s fleshy arms, the space her arms shape, and her lingerie’s skirt and off-the-shoulder straps. A plunging or rocketing spearhead or chevron is the elemental form in Beckmann’s vocabulary. It appears as fish, plants, fingers, splayed legs, king’s crown, ship boughs, and daggers. It wedges momentous feeling into place. His most scabrous and outraged image of Nazi culture, Hell of Birds, done the same year as the iris painting, is a vicious ritualistic riot of beaks, wounds, talons (in Sieg-Heil position), knives, and feathers that could double as knives. Even my Toilette picture is, in its formal dynamics, nervous-making. I don’t know any other modern artist who painted so often out of fury—for and at experience and meaning. MOMA’s retrospective let us see the whole arc of his ambition and how his formal aspirations were inseparable from his raucous visionary prowess. The last major show, Max Beckmann in Exile, which ran at the old Soho Guggenheim in 1997, limited itself to things he produced in Amsterdam and the States, and it emphasized the triptychs. As a maker-colorist, draftsman, performer, personality-Beckmann had a feeling for what he believed compelled great art since antiquity, the “mystery of being.” The retrospective bluntly shows how impudent his art was, different from the boldness of Braque and Roualt (whom he admired), or of Matisse and Picasso (whom he did not). He was a classical personalist who, while the pictures often are a jagged irregular weave of ambivalent imagery and uncertainty, showed no creative self-doubt. The images were a complete expression of the personality. Even when sardonic or baleful tones tense up a picture, the affect underlying and sustaining everything is that jangling sorrow, which gives his pictures their clarifying remorselessness.
The contemporary artist is the true creator of a world that did not exist before he gave shape to it.
—”The Artist in the State,” 1927
As a young artist Beckmann aligned himself with the Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity that countered Expressionism’s slurred forms and emotional operatics. He wanted the reality of the picture to bear lucid feeling. He held to this even after he began making triptychs in 1932. He completed ten and left one unfinished at his death. (Experimenting to the end, he began the unfinished picture by first outlining then filling in color, the reverse of the previous color-constructed work.) The triptychs are physical and spiritual worlds in collision, contemporary secular imagery (circus, theater, parlor) banging against baggy symbologies drawn from pagan, Christian, and Kabbalistic traditions. Scholars give straight-up readings of them, but I’m easy with shiftiness. Beckmann was more interested in mystical insinuation than narrative, and I marvel at how he loads stiff, hard-edge forms with supple suggestiveness. Each “symbol” is really a wobbly iridescence, taking some of its significance from its ambience and flashing forth a multiple suggestiveness of its own. Consider fish. In the right panel of Departure (1931-33), two lovers bound upside down to each other compose a fishy form; a bellhop (who turns up in other pictures) offers them a stiff red fish before they fall in the water. In the center panel, a man, a royal redeemer of some kind, holds a net full of fish. In The Argonauts (1949-50) an ancient rises on a ladder from the sea, the source. Fish as sexual sign, Christian story, pagan myth. A fish is also, in its way, an onderduiker, a diver or submerger, the word applied to Jewish children hiding in cellars during the Nazi occupation of Holland, while Beckmann was in Amsterdam, children whose legs we see under the stage in the Actors (1941-42) triptych, the underground reality beneath the staged one, though at the same time the legs belong merely to extras waiting their cue. When asked, Beckmann either refused to apply meanings to specific images or else kicked up more dust. “The fish signified Christ,” he once said. “I use it with its vapid stupid look-as a symbol of man’s bewilderment at the mystery of eternity.” I think Beckmann designed each triptych as a labyrinth of provocations. I get disoriented by their meandering insinuations and am satisfied because they don’t cohere. Beckmann told a dealer that the perfect viewer of these congested pictures is someone who bears within the same “code” as he does. He also said the pictures were never intended to be objects to decode.
It is not the subject that matters but the translation of the subject into the abstraction of the surface by means of painting.
—”On My Painting”
Two late pictures. A vanitas still life from 1945, with playing cards and three skulls, jaunty skulls, grinning large, one biting down on the ace of spades. The space is crushed forward, so that all the merriment seems stood up on the table top, not presented to but pushed at us. Not the sort of carnivalesque gaiety we were expecting. The subject may not matter, but the translation of the subject, as a subject, is everything. And Beckmann’s last self-portrait, from 1950. He’s dressed in a royal blue jacket (a red chevron edges its sleeve), a wary, middle-aged student of the world. We see the skull under the skin but not the mouth, which is covered by a long thin hand pinching a cigarette, the gate (like the horn) between him and us. In painterly terms, the handling is quick and gestural and frank, but the compositional entirety recedes from us, pushed out while being slightly withdrawn, not shy or evasive but uneasy, leery. It’s the only self-portrait that gives up a self-control we didn’t know existed in the others until he made this one. He looks submerged in himself and lost to time.
W. S. Di Piero’s new book of poems, Brother Fire, will be published by Knopf in the fall of 2004. He writes a column on the visual arts for the San Diego Reader.
