Word: beckmann
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...sense of culture they try to construct withers in the red glare of National Socialism. After 1933 their story becomes a lugubrious tale of giants in exile (Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckmann), of ruined hope, lopped lives and rampant state philistinism. By 1945 there is no life left in the expressionist impulse, at least in Germany; it can only be reborn in America as abstraction, and then re-exported to exhausted Europe. By 1955 figurative expressionism is a dodo--shot by Hitler, eaten by art history, its bones a museum specimen. Thus spake, until lately, the scenario...
...overthrown." High on playpen radicalism, the '60s brought a massacre of plaster casts and a general winding down of life drawing in most, though not all, American schools. Yet it is obvious by now that all the great draftsmen of the modernist era, from Seurat to Picasso, from Beckmann to De Kooning, were grounded in academic processes and could no more have done without them than a plane can do without a landing strip. Hence the paradox: a figurative revival partly spearheaded by the poorest generation of draftsmen in American history...
...told the New York Times last winter, "are the artists who speak to me: Giotto, Duccio, Van Gogh." Doubtless this list will change if he tries a ceiling, but Schnabel has never learned to draw; in graphic terms, his art has barely got beyond the lumpy pastiches of Max Beckmann and Richard Lindner he did as a student in Houston. The dull, uninflected megalomania of his kitsch- expressionist imagery (Sex, Death, God and Me) is rant, a bogus "appropriation" of profundity...
...also hell. In order to paint it, Beckmann developed a repertory of figures that seem literally imprisoned by the limits of the canvas. The sense of dislocation and implacable graphic firmness this involved, in works like The Dream, 1921, was surpassed by no other artist. The amputee on a ladder with the fish slung round his neck, the war veteran blowing his tin trumpet, the catatonic blond girl--in their mingled density and strangeness, they seem like quotations from some permanent layer of German consciousness. All the more so because Beckmann thought very hard about his own cultural heritage...
...bare bone of Beckmann's message is that fame, money and the love of women are not all they are said to be, but the strange, staid-looking conviction with which Beckmann invests his personages carries his painting beyond moralizing to something like magical invocation, a raising of the worst noonday ghosts of the '30s. He was certainly one of the great fabulists of modern art. But unlike the surrealists, he was not content with the effort to tap into a collective unconscious through the littered cellar of the individual self. And unlike lesser but more popular artists like Marc...