Mad Max: Max Beckmann at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens, New York from June 26 to September 19, 2003

By Joseph Phelan

Upon finishing Witness, the memoirs of Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist who became an enemy of Stalinism, André Malraux complimented the author: You have not come back from hell empty handed.

Visitors may want to say something similar after viewing the 133 works in the Max Beckmann retrospective currently at the Museum of Modern Art Queens. If Beckmann (1884-1950) is the German painter of the catastrophic first half of the twentieth century, he earned his title the hard way. He painted from the center of the inferno.

While Beckmann was a man of his time, he did not fit his time, either in the largeness of his artistic ambition or in the variety and complexity of his approach. As exhibition curator Robert Storr observes, Beckmann "painted the enigmas and the contradictions of the twentieth century in ways that resonate profoundly in the unsettled reality of the twenty-first century. He painted pictures about human passions and predicaments which are impossible to ignore".

Beckmann's astonishing talent for the representation of beauty was manifest early on in his Young Men by the Sea (1905). This classical composition of naked youths, deep in meditation while one plays the flute, could be a rendition of the Greek gods. With its "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" it is a brilliant expression of the Germanic vision of Classical Greece, made famous by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Wolfgang Goethe in the late eighteenth century. The painting brought him gold and glory and a winter's study in Florence.

But it was two other German thinkers of the nineteenth century who more profoundly influenced Beckmann's thinking about the purpose of art. As an art student he read Arthur Schopenhauer, who is best known as the philosopher of pessimism. Carl Jung explained the widespread appeal of this resolutely non-academic thinker to so many nineteenth century artists:

He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil -- all those things which the [other philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe.

[Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, 1961, p. 69]

Schopenhauer inevitably left him open to an even greater philosophical influence: Frederic Nietzsche. Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, caused a sensation throughout Europe by sweeping away the old formula about the Greeks of Goethe and Winckelmann. Nietzsche went about "explaining" the suffering, confusion, passion and evil of Greek tragedy for a contemporary audience. He did so by uncovering the source of the tragic world view in the clash between the "Apollonian" drive for reason, law and logical order, and the wild, instinctual, amoral forces in life which were symbolized for the Greeks by the Dionysus � the god of intoxication.

Myriads of artists in pre-World War I Europe went around calling themselves Nietszchians largely on the basis of this celebration of the Dionysian. Beckmann's concerns went deeper. He was irresistibly drawn to the tragedy of human life and looked to become a master of the large scale history painting which traditionally could capture it. When his early works like The Earthquake in Messina (1909) and The Sinking of the Titanic (1912) failed to win the approval of critics, he was baffled. He faced the problem of all history painters since the invention of the photography. How could the painter, in the cool of the study, compete with the immediacy and authenticity of the camera?

So Beckmann went in search of what only a painter could do. He found advice in several quarters. On a visit to Paris he met Edvard Munch (who illustrated an edition of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra), who encouraged the younger man to follow the fantastic style of his own famous vision of subjective horror - The Scream. On a trip to Geneva he encountered Ferdinand Hodler, who showed him how to do historical and mythological themes in firmly choreographed murals.

But it was at Colmar that he saw something truly awesome: the fantastic Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald, designed for the Hospital Order of St. Anthony. Intended to be seen daily by the sick, the altarpiece shows the demonic temptation of St. Anthony and the gruesome wounds of the crucified Christ in the most graphic detail. The expressive intensity of the work and its complex enfolding format fascinated Beckmann. He now had the technique and the template to capture human suffering in a way no photographer could... All he needed was the right contemporary subject.

Beckmann's service as a medical orderly in World War I supplied the necessary horrific subject matter. His service as a medical corpsman in the trenches of Flanders nearly drove him mad, and he was invalided out of the army in 1915, suffering from fits of hallucination and unbearable depression. As the famous Self-Portrait with Red Scarf of 1917 shows, he was ferociously concentrated, willfully intense, and deeply unhappy.

At this time Beckmann began to speak of "the infinite space" whose foreground has always got to be "filled with some rubbish or other, so as to disguise its dreadful depth." This element in his own theory of art was but a reflection of the fact that Beckmann himself was now prone to a keen feeling of total abandonment and desolation. He was in a constant struggle to overcome his own personal horror vacui. With a view to winning this struggle he decided to become a recorder of the unofficial history � the nightmare of history, so to speak - of a Europe gone mad with cruelty, ideological murder, and deprivation, as in Family Picture (1920) and in his masterpiece of the period, The Night (1918-19).

"The sole justifications of our existence as artists, superfluous and egotistic though we are, are to confront people with the image of their destiny." This is Beckmann but it also sounds like Adolf Hitler, the would-be art student rejected by the schools in Vienna who, as a result, lived within the shadow of the label "failed artist." At a later stage, this would-be artist's government held the infamous "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") show which opened in Munich on June 26, 1937. Among the 730 controversial works gathered there by the Nazi curators were ten paintings by Beckmann, including his 1917 self-portrait. There were more works by Beckmann in the show than by any other living artist.

Shortly after the exhibit opened, Beckmann left Germany for Amsterdam. He quickly painted Hell of the Birds (1938), which depicts him being flayed alive by his Nazi critics. After the war he moved to the United States to teach and paint. Like many exiles and émigrés to America, he must have felt like The Acrobat on the Trapeze who might slip at any time and become the Falling Man. Yet in The Argonauts (1950), he returns to his great themes of aspiration and ambition, tragedy and transcendence with masterful assurance and command. Here he was finally able to fulfill his greatest wish:

Really I only wanted to paint beautiful pictures.

Max Beckmann: Bleak artist of war and reaction

A major retrospective of the work of the 20th Century painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950) is currently running at the Tate Modern in London. Given the exhibition's major concern with war and violent conflict, the timing could hardly be more apt as we approach a likely bloody imperialist war in the Middle East.

Beckmann's work springs from his terrible experiences during World War One, the political crisis of 1920s and 1930s Germany, the rise of Hitler and, finally, exile.

There is great tension and contradictions in much of his works - between, on the one hand, a bleak and fatalistic view of humanity, and, on the other hand, a view of hope and possible liberation.

The Tate exhibition starts with some of Beckmann's pre-World War One paintings, such as The Sinking Of The Titanic (1912). Critics do not generally regard this and other early pieces as very good works of art (indeed many critics do not rate his technique at all). However the depiction of the sinking of the huge passenger liner does represent an attempt by Beckmann to depict large-scale human tragedy, to engage with the world.

The 'Great War' had a lasting and profound effect on Beckmann. In 1915 he suffered a mental breakdown after years as a medical orderly and was discharged from the German army. In artistic terms, the harrowing experience of senseless mass death on the battlefield brought new urgency, realism and bleakness to his painting.

The Grenade (1916) and Resurrection (1918) convey the trenches with black scores in incoherent scenery. Another work, Hell (1919), is a powerful indictment of mass unemployment, poverty, corruption and societal breakdown in inter-war Germany.

Beckmann's caustic, almost misanthropic, view also indiscriminately condemns all political forces and ideologies. One of his most disturbing paintings, In The Night (1918-1919), shows a family being tortured. The painting was made during years of revolution and counter-revolution in the short-lived Weimar Republic.

One torturer looks like a typical foot soldier of the embryonic forces of Nazism used against the working class. Another savage tormenter, however, has more than a passing resemblance to Lenin. Are we supposed to conclude from this that nascent Nazism and communism are 'twin evils'?

Paradoxically, at the same time, Beckmann found it important to record in art the murder of Rosa Luxembourg, the great revolutionary Marxist who was killed by reactionary forces after a failed workers' uprising in 1919.

"Aristocracy of Bolshevism"

By the late 1920s, Beckmann was gaining considerable renown and success. This welcome change in circumstances was revealed in Self Portrait In Tuxedo (1927). In his 'philosophical writings' on this painting, Beckmann says that everyone should have access to such good quality clothing. He would like to see a society where there is an "aristocracy of Bolshevism".

This extraordinary statement reveals that even when he was able to move beyond confused pessimism, and when he genuinely strove for empathy with humanity, Beckmann nevertheless projected a bourgeois and very individualistic Utopianism.

Official success for Beckmann came to an end with the rise of Hitler, which is not surprising given that the Third Reich could not countenance any portrayal of German society that honestly attempted to show it as it really was - impoverished, corrupt and violent. The Nazi ideologues deemed his work "degenerate".

It was in response to Nazi terror that Beckmann produced his first tripitch (a picture of three panels hinged vertically together), called Departure (1932-1935). The side panels depict torture and suffering, while the centre piece shows a woman and child on board a boat on a bright blue sea (although hinting at an unknown fate awaiting them).

Once war broke out, Beckmann was always under the threat of arrest by the occupying German army. His paintings are heavy with dreary mythology. By 1947, however, Beckmann and his family were able to go to the US, where he found late critical and public acclaim and painted prodigiously until his death.

The Tate exhibition reveals an artist extremely sensitive to a crucial period in German history: Beckmann could always adeptly portray the worst aspects of German capitalist society. Yet his art is highly individualistic; at times narcissistic, and lacked true world vision.

Niall Mulholland, CWI, London

Max Beckmann: The greatest mystery of all is reality

MAX BECKMANN:"The greatest mystery of all is reality."

Max Beckmann, a metaphysical protagonist of reality, expressed in his own terms, crudely, softly, finely; which ever the subject demanded. But the subject did not dictate, Beckmann held the brush!

Beckmann was born in Leipzig on February 12, 1884, to farmer parents from the farming area of Braunschweig. After Max's birth they gave up the farm and moved into Leipzig where his father, Carl, worked as a real estate agent and flour merchant. Later he took work in a laboratory making artificial meerschaum. Young Max preferred drawing to schoolwork, and began his formal studies in 1900 at the Weimar Art Academy.

In 1903 he married Minna Tube and they both moved to Paris. Beckmann was never influenced by any art movement, or the work of any artist. That is a hard thing to say and mean about any artist living or dead. Oh yes, he studied the classics, but had so very real an energy, so real a need to express himself that imitation of any kind, outside the Aristolean meaning, would never have satisfied his lust or vision.

He painted freely.

Beckmann probably painted more self-portraits than any other artist. He painted subjects from the entertainment world, many portraits of family and friends, and countless allegorical compositions with characters symbolic of ancient myths.

Beckmann was drafted into the First World War and wrote much of what it was like:

"I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers. On my left the shooting had the sharp explosion of the infantry artillery, on my right could be heard the sporadic cannon shots thundering from the front, and up above the sky was clear and the sun bright, sharp above the whole space. It was so wonderful outside that even the wild senselessness of this enormous death. whose music I hear again and again, could not disturb me from my great enjoyment!"

Beckmann spent the years of World War Two in Germany, outlawed by Hitler from exhibiting, but his paintings, though branded as "degenerate by the Third Reich, were never confiscated or destroyed. He was drafted, but rejected as unfit. After the war he came to America where he and his wife lived in Missouri. Beckmann was a Painter in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the late '40s he moved to Manhattan, where he died of a heart attack enroute to see his work in a show at the Metropolitan Museum on December 27, 1950. many say he was merely walking his dog, but at any rate he was caught in the middle of living.

Nothing meant more to Max Beckmann than his own originality, as a human being, and as an artist. He was a deeply spiritual man, with his own ideas, and we end with this quote, the one we started with, for it sums up this man entirely: "The greatest mystery of all is reality."

Richard E. Schiff ASL
SoHo ART

Max Beckmann, Self portrait with red scarf, 1917