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Few German painters have had a career as long and distinguished as did Max Beckmann. His accomplishments are even more remarkable when you consider how his contemporary peers had their lives tragically cut short while serving in war or were unable to regain their creative abilities following Nazi persecution.
Beckmann not only survived such misfortune, but actually excelled despite them. Between 1905 and 1950, he created more than eight hundred paintings and hundreds of prints and drawings, an incredible body of work under any circumstances.
Initially acclaimed by his country and then condemned by the Nazis, he was forced to flee his homeland and work in isolation while the war ravaged Europe. Beckmann didn't identify with a particular school or style. He preferred instead to expressionistically celebrate the grand traditions of painting such as the still life, portraits, and historical and mythological subjects.
Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1884, the youngest of three children. His father was a grain merchant who died when Max was only ten years old. By the age of fifteen, after finishing several years of boarding school, he decided to become a painter (over his family's objections).
From 1900 to 1903, he attended school in Weimar where he learned to draw from sculptures and live models and studied principally under Carl Frithjof Smith. While there, he met Minna Tube, a fellow artist whom he would later marry and have a son with.
By 1906, Beckmann had become an accomplished painter. During this time, he moved to Berlin to participate in exhibitions with the Berlin Secession, the then-predominant Modern German painting movement. Beckmann's paintings from this period are characterized with an Impressionistic style: landscapes and beach scenes rendered in stippled brushstrokes that accentuated the play of light across forms.
As a confirmation of their high regard, his colleagues elected him to the executive board of the Secession in 1910. But Beckmann preferred making art to making policy, so he resigned the following year in order to devote himself to painting.
In the years leading to World War I, Beckmann's work evolved into grand compositions of religious and mythical subjects in the tradition of Delacroix, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The war interrupted his work, however, and after serving as a medical volunteer for a year, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Frankfurt in 1915 to recuperate.
Within two years, Beckmann resumed painting. His new forms were more mannered and polished, his colors more intense, and his rendering of space more Cubist, with figures torturously compressed and tilting precariously. His new works revealed a tapestry of contemporary social criticism by using religious and mythical themes. He increasingly depicted masked and costumed circus characters as allegorical figures, a practice that became a hallmark of his art.
By the mid-1920's, Beckmann had become one of Germany's foremost Modern painters. His work was widely praised as a definitive example of Neue Sachlichkeit (or New Objectivity), a short-lived movement distinguished by the rejection of Expressionism and the revival of Realism. Neue Sachlichkeit was typically cynical in appearance, as it chronicled the bourgeois excesses of the ruling classes.
In 1925, he divorced Minna Tube and married Mathilde von Kaulbach, who became the subject of many of his important paintings. The following year, he had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the J. B. Neumann Gallery in New York. This show helped expand his renown to the international art community.
With several distinguished publications promoting his art, Beckmann was granted a large retrospective exhibition in 1928 at the Mannheim Art Museum. That same year, Beckmann received one of Germany's highest honors in the fine arts and a gold medal from the city of Dsseldorf in recognition of his artistic achievements. In 1929, he was awarded second prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh.
Beckmann's standing in art abruptly declined when Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. The Nazis viewed Modern art as morally and socially corrupt, so they started purging Germany's cultural institutions of everything they believed to be decadent. Beckmann's work, along with that of many highly regarded artists, was suddenly labeled "degenerate."
By 1937, Beckmann's art was methodically removed from German museums and nearly six hundred of his works had been confiscated. By July of that year Beckmann fled with his wife to live in Amsterdam, never to return. It was an abrupt and humiliating ending for an artist who had been hailed a national treasure only four years prior.
Beckmann's diaries from these years reveal his frequent visits to cabarets, carnivals, and the theater. On one level, these distractions offered temporary relief from the horrors of the war, tragedies that nonetheless found their way into his art. His paintings from these years - some of his most important works - display subjects whose identity is both constructed and obscured by masquerade.
Three of his triptychs (three-paneled works), The Acrobats (1939), The Actors (1941-42), and Carnival (1942-43), make specific reference to these genres, depicting a theatrical display of human tragedy rather than celebrating the lighthearted pleasure such spectacles typically evoke.
After World War II, Beckmann immigrated to the United States, where he taught and painted during the remaining years of his life. Again he had found widespread acceptance as a major contributor to twentieth-century art. When he died in December 1950, he had just finished The Argonauts (1949-50), the ninth in a series of monumental triptychs. His studio contained several unfinished canvases, including a tenth triptych--a testimony to the boundless creative energy that he possessed despite his failing health.
"Beckmann and Paris," at the Saint Louis Art Museum through May 9, includes nearly 100 paintings by Beckmann, Matisse, Picasso, and others to show that Beckmann's themes and aesthetic approaches have many parallels with those of his contemporaries in France. Subjects that Beckmann shared with his colleagues in Paris include elegant society portraits, colorful still lifes, and voluptuous nudes. The paintings, from public and private collections in Europe and the U.S., have never before been shown together. (314) 721-0072, Ext. 204; www.slam.org.
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Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 9 No. 6 -- April 1999