Word: beckmann
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...show of this and 19 other Beckmann paintings at the downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is--no other word for it--a revelation. Beckmann, who died in 1950, was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but he remains comparatively underknown in Manhattan. Thirty-one years have passed since a New York museum devoted a show to his work. Why this should be, one can only guess. Presumably it has something to do with the belief that purely abstract painting was the climax of modernism, so that a painter whose entire sensibility...
This seems likely even though Beckmann himself believed that "every form of significant art from Bellini to Henri Rousseau has ultimately been abstract." But Beckmann was always a contradictor, a towering imagination that made no concessions to the fashions or political pressures of his time. And in the Guggenheim's show one sees the very peak of his work: seven of the nine triptychs (three-panel paintings, based on the format of church altarpieces) that he painted immediately before and during his exile...
Part of Hitler's cultural program was the extirpation of what he called degenerate art--essentially, the kind of modernism of which Beckmann, in the early 1930s, was an acknowledged leader. Thus, soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, an entire apparatus of state censorship rolled over on Beckmann. His work was systematically removed from German museums; within five years, 600 of his paintings had been confiscated. After he and his wife fled, he lived and painted in Amsterdam for 10 years, using an old tobacco storeroom for a studio, and then in 1947 went to the U.S., where...
Throughout his exile Beckmann carried monumental ambitions with him, and these were fully realized in his triptychs. They represent one of the greatest efforts of the symbolic imagination in all 20th century art, a sort of theatrum mundi, or world theater, in which the follies and tragedies of Europe, along with its pining for a utopian order on the very brink of its collapse, were given an unrelentingly vivid allegorical form...
...Although Beckmann had to bear the burden of politics in full measure, there are no specific political references in his triptychs because as a painter he wasn't interested in the subject. He wanted his art to go beyond that, relying on what he called "the uninterrupted labor of the eyes" to realize experience in sensation, translating it into form, color and space...