Word: beckmann
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...thing about the Max Beckmann retrospective that began its travels in Munich a year ago is that it will have been seen in only two U.S. cities --first St. Louis, and now (through Feb. 3) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. New York City turned it down flat, apparently because the Museum of Modern Art held a big Beckmann show 20 years ago. But since one of the main facts of contemporary art is the resurgence of figurative expressionism, it seems ridiculous that the East should not see what, despite some trimming, amounts to the definitive exhibition...
...thinks of him, with reason, as quintessentially "German." Yet his art had the same relationship (or lack of one) to German expressionism as Edouard Manet's did to French impressionism. Beckmann was not interested in the pseudotranscendental aspects of expressionism--its yearnings for a higher world and bleatings about this lower one, its way of ducking into the "mystical" and the "primitive" as an escape from the politics of immediate experience. To him, as to the Dadaists in Berlin, this was for air heads. "My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art," he noted...
...Beckmann aimed to be a psychological--if not a literal--realist in a bad age: the Courbet of the cannibals. His work crystallized in the face of two major subjects, the first World War (in which he served the German army as a volunteer medical orderly, until the unremitting chaos and death of trench fighting drove him into mental collapse in 1915) and the city. He was not the first artist to discover how the imminence of death can free the imagination, but he was utterly frank about it. "Since I have been under fire, I live through every shot...
...demand for specialized calendars of all types has been a boon to both bookstores and publishers. An estimated 600 titles are available this year, up from just 120 or so five years ago. Says Jon Beckmann, publisher of Sierra Club Books: "In the 1960s people never bought calendars." Nowadays they may buy several. The California-based Sierra Club was a pioneer in marketing richly illustrated calendars as wall and desk adornments. The organization expects to sell about 400,000 copies of its 1984 engagement book, which has pictures of natural vistas. Price: $7.95. Seeing the promotional value and fund-raising...
...forms of atomic power in West Germany and to the presence of U.S. nuclear warheads on local soil. The Greens fear that Zimmermann's appointment presages a crackdown on the massive antinuclear demonstrations that have blossomed across the country in the past year. Green Spokesman Lucas Beckmann last week called Zimmermann's appointment "a scandal...