Word: beckmann
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...means toward making such an art came in part, as it must, from a sense of continuity with both past and present. Beckmann's paintings draw, for instance, on German Gothic woodcarvings, in which the task of scooping space from a thin panel causes the figures to stand stiffly as though in fright. Equally, his work was influenced by Matisse, whose daring, expressive color and use of black translate, in Beckmann, into a stylistic effect similar to stained glass, with burning patches of green or flesh color emphasized by a webwork of heavy black outlines...
That sense of the specific form undergirds Beckmann's invented symbols of a world in which ancient prototypes are jammed together with blatantly up-to-date images drawn from city life in the 1930s and '40s: the masked warriors with spears and cuirasses along with the blond cigarette girls, the sexy shackled women in modern negligees and the awful birds with staring eyes that were one of Beckmann's prime images of fear and persecution. "Have you never thought," he wrote to a young woman artist, "that in the hellish heat of intoxication amongst princes, harlots and gangsters, there...
...Beckmann's exile seems prefigured in the first of his triptychs, Departure, 1932-33. Its left and right panels contain scenes of horror, torment and dislocation: a man with amputated hands tied to a pillar, a woman in bondage about to be axed by a headsman, another woman with a lamp (perhaps a muse or a guide) to whom the upside-down corpse of her partner is bound. One cannot decode these too literally, but they presumably represent the chaos overtaking Beckmann's homeland. The center panel portrays the artist's dream of escape. The blue horizon (the color...
...triptychs are more straightforward than others. Beginning, 1946-49, is perhaps the most explicit of them all, a summing-up of childhood memory. The small boy in the nursery, dressed in a hussar's uniform and riding furiously on a rocking horse with drawn sword, is plainly Beckmann himself; a Puss-in-Boots hangs upside down from the ceiling; a languid carrot-haired odalisque on the sofa in the foreground blows iridescent soap bubbles of reverie and future desire; and a schoolmasterly figure holds up his hand in a gesture of censoriousness. On the right is a schoolroom scene with...
...king gazes through the thick black mullions of a window into a vision outside, of a blind organ-grinder making celestial music for a choir of angels. It is a version of the dream of unmediated childhood vision in the work of William Blake, "the noble English genius," as Beckmann called him, "a superterrestrial patriarch." It also represents the starting point of Beckmann's lifelong quest as a painter, his quest for the self, "the great veiled mystery of the world...