Word: beckmanns
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...with a slightly shambling gait and a dented cannonball of a head on which a hard derby hat was jammed like a secondary dome. His solidity and doubt come across in Self-Portrait with a Horn, painted in 1938, the second year of his exile from Nazi Germany. Max Beckmann holds a bugle, which he has just blown. His eyes don't meet yours; he looks away, listening for an answering note. It's a piercing image of the artist deprived of his context, hoping to connect, uncertain that he can. European man, signaling from a collapsing world...
...gallery devoted to "Vanitas" images, the vast majority of the paintings are traditional scenes of hunted game; three modern works--a Max Beckmann, a Georgia O'Keeffe, and an Axel Kesselbohmer--show skulls. Not one seventeenth- or eighteenth- century painting shows any of the other symbols associated with passing time; after such a lengthy label description of the section, their absence is conspicuous. However, in the "Fruit" section and again in the "Trompe I'Oeil" section, there are perfect examples of decaying fruit (one label doesn't even acknowledge its symbolic value) that would have been far more effective...
Then he started doing other pictorial styles as subjects of his own. Picasso, Fernand Leger, Carlo Carra, Max Beckmann and so on. Then kitsch Modernism, as imagined by cartoonists. The trouble with these versions of Modernist classics 'n' clinkers is their sameness. After a while, it isn't very interesting to be shown that just about anything can be turned into a Lichtenstein, congealed in his cryogenic style. There's none of the engaged imagination, the sense of a transforming mind at work, that one gets in, say, Miro's wild versions of a 17th century Dutch interior, down...
Over there, across the park, one saw the works of Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and others. The viewer could imagine what demons stood behind them: the creeping Jew, the scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm grandeur as $ interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two shows asked, do you want...
Although some of the 650 works have disappeared and others remain unidentifiable, Barron was able to borrow some 180 items that were in the original show. Among them are numerous masterpieces of the period, such as Kirchner's piercing image of castration anxiety, Self-Portrait as Soldier, 1915, and Beckmann's Still Life with Musical Instruments, 1926, perhaps the greatest of his still-life paintings, now seen for the first time...