Word: beckmann
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...Beckmann was not permanently crushed by the debacle of war but finally responded to what he had witnessed with a sense of mission: "Just now, even more than before the war, I feel the need to be in the cities among my fellow men. This is where our place is. We must take part in the whole misery that is to come. We must surrender our heart and our nerves to the dreadful screams of pain of the poor disillusioned people....Our superfluous, self-filled existence can now be motivated only by giving our fellow men a picture of their...
...result of the war, Beckmann had given up painting as an "unpardonable luxury," confining himself to the production of some twenty-four etchings. Toward the end of his convalescence, however, his passion to paint returned. The war had provoked in him a scream of horror, a scream of fear, a scream of rage, a scream of protest--a violent screaming of the senses which could only be resolved with colors and shapes on canvas. His painting of the "Descent from the Cross" (1917), showing the removal of a hopelessly abject and skeletal Jesus by two men grimacing with revulsion, sums...
More than any other artist with the exception of Rembrandt, Beckmann uses his painting as a means for confronting himself, for actualizing his awareness of his individual destiny: My way of expressing my Ego is by painting...as a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes...
Relentlessly probing his own consciousness, he tries to fulfill his vow to give his fellow men a picture of their fate. Beckmann's numerous self-portraits testify to his preoccupation with defining his identity, allowing us to share in these moments of self-confrontation. He began to draw himself at an early age--his 1898 "Self-Portrait with Soap Bubbles" is an idyllic scene of the fourteen-year-old Beckmann, facing sideways, blowing soap bubbles across a whole countryside of space. This leisurely, carefree, open stance does not fit him for long, for within three years he produces...
...most surprising self-portrait in the show is Beckmann's depiction of himself at twenty-three as the young aesthete. Standing before a window overlooking Florence, his pose is archly self-critical. The effeminate position of the hand, the soft, glistening, sensual mouth and the almost humorous defiance and cynicism of the worldly young man, set the stage of his subsequent quest for what he perceptively refers to as "male mysticism...