Word: beckmann
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...University or, more generally, by the anarchic and utopian Bohemia of the '60s: the Fluxus group and its best-known member, Joseph Beuys, with his shaman's wands and dead hares; Eugen Schonebeck, with his images of mutants and cripples; K.H. Hodicke, who made fervently swiped homages to Max Beckmann; and Georg Baselitz, creator of clumsy, wistful figures stumbling about in an apocalyptic landscape...
...there is nothing like it in American art today. Sargent was certainly no modernist, but the fiercely competitive atelier system of figure drawing that formed his style when he studied with Carolus-Duran in Paris also underpinned the high standards of early modernist draftsmanship in Matisse, Picasso or Beckmann. Hence, though his relation to the avant-garde was nil, he is no longer to be dismissed as a flashy bore. There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious sight of an artist's guts on parade...
...places of exile. Born in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, he died in that of Reagan and Thatcher, just before the expressionist revival of the '80s took hold. Recent years have seen major shows of such expressionist masters as Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, and now the 100th anniversary of O.K.'s birth is marked by a retrospective at London's Tate Gallery. (The exhibition runs through Aug. 10, and will go to Zurich in the fall and New York City in the winter.) Comprising 241 paintings and drawings, with prints and assorted memorabilia, this will be remembered...
...makes a brilliant case. (It especially needed to be made in London, which has not had a major survey of German expressionism since 1938.) Admittedly, there are some weak patches at the beginning. For some reason, the curators did not include any of the triptychs that were Beckmann's crowning achievement as a pictorial fabulist; and so, despite the presence of two or three works as good as Aerial Acrobats, 1928--a Goya-like capricho rendered with grandly menacing stolidity--a visitor might not grasp why Beckmann could be considered the greatest German artist of the 20th century...
...that cast itself, in large ecstatic terms, as the liberation of the repressed self from the bonds of history and convention. The idea that painting could do this was one of the reigning ideals of early modern art; today it is hardly more than sales talk. But when Max Beckmann declared that he wanted his paintings to "accuse God of everything he has done wrong," he meant just what he said. German painting sought to be moralizing and prophetic. Sometimes the sense of % prophecy is actual. An extraordinary set of images by Ludwig Meidner, an artist little known outside Germany...