Word: beckmann
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...nation in this century has tormented itself as much as Germany. One war put it at odds with the world; a second war earned it incomprehensible guilt. German artists, though scorned by the Nazis, learned to turn the other cheek. The cheekiest was the late painter Max Beckmann, who wrote that he wanted to give "our fellow men a picture of their fate, and this can be done only if you love them." Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill could have supplied the words and music...
...Beckmann's art jangles with the banjo beat and brassy horns of a prewar Berlin nightclub. Despair dresses up in a mauve derby and dirty spats, strutting stiffly around a shallow, klieg-lit stage like a man who has a pocketful of cash and a pawn ticket on his soul. Beckmann painted as if his eyes were taped open; yet his vision of man's fate is shot through with blinding compassion. So endowed, his art ages little, as shown in his first retrospective currently on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, including more than...
Wastepaper Figures. "Strange," wrote Beckmann in his diary in 1947, "that in every city I always hear the lions roar." He loved the street-scene turmoil and crammed his major canvases with crowds of jostling, uncongenial characters. Son of a Leipzig flour merchant, Beckmann was already a success at the age of 30 when World War I broke out. To avoid killing, he volunteered for the medical corps. Still, the constant exposure to slaughter, which he often drew, punctured his optimism so destructively that 30 years later he wondered if war had wounded his soul...
Altarpiece Billboards. "There is something that repeats itself in all good art," Beckmann said, "that is artistic sensuousness, combined with artistic objectivity toward the thing represented." Beckmann subjected even his nightmares to a harsh, objective light and portrayed them with a concrete reality that drew him acclaim, along with George Grosz and Otto Dix, as a leader of Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity group...
With the rise of the Nazis, Beckmann began painting triptychs, turning his medieval altarpiece form into a public billboard. His first, Departure, peopled by dismembered captives, masked lords and indifferent servants, was done during the first year of Hitler's rule. It was Beckmann's Guer nica, his disgust at the terror then brutalizing his own country. By the time he had fled to Amsterdam in 1937, the Nazis had removed 509 of his works, declared decadent, from German museums...