‘Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925’ Review: An Artist’s Several Selves
A show at the Neue Galerie reveals the many different aspects of the German painter’s work during a decade that saw the ravages of World War I and the struggles and developing styles of the Weimar era. The review of Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925 at the Neue Galerie, by Olaf Peters, professor at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, has highlighted Beckmann as a modern-day interpreter of religious themes, a painter of suave society portraits, and a fierce draftsman, graphic artist, and social critic. The show, organized by Peters, brings together about 100 works in various media to examine a crucial decade in Beckmann's formation, when his work changed dramatically during World War I. It was also a time when Beckmann was greatly admired in Germany, before the Nazis made him the poster-boy of the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, forcing him and his wife into exile in the Netherlands. The review concludes with the show's selection of female portraits and incisive drawings and prints of male sitters. The next gallery is devoted to drypoints and lithographs published between 1914 and 1919.
Được phát hành : 2 năm trước qua Karen Wilkin trong Entertainment
The name “ Max Beckmann ” evokes images of side-show stages crowded with ambiguous acrobats, Fisher Kings, mutilated women, bound and masked figures and the like, often in confrontational, over-sized triptychs. Are these mysterious people actors or nightmare personages? Torturers or the tortured? Emblems of larger issues? Add lush paint and intense color, and it’s not surprising that once seen, these works can haunt us.
Yet it turns out that there is another Beckmann or, perhaps, several other Beckmanns: a modern-day interpreter of religious themes, a painter of suave society portraits and images of a dapper self, a fierce draftsman, graphic artist and social critic. We meet them all in “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925” at the Neue Galerie. Organized by Olaf Peters, professor at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, an expert in the period, the show brings together about 100 works in various media to examine a crucial decade in the artist’s formation, when his work changed dramatically. It was also a time when Beckmann was greatly admired in Germany, before the Nazis made him the poster-boy of the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, forcing him and his wife into exile in the Netherlands. (Born in Leipzig in 1884, Beckmann died in New York in 1950, after finally obtaining a visa to come to the U.S. in 1947.)
During World War I, Beckmann served as a nurse and medical orderly, becoming so traumatized by the carnage that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged. The Neue Galerie show begins with drawings and drypoints triggered by his harrowing experiences, including wartime images made in 1915. The unlovely, emaciated bodies in paintings such as “Descent From the Cross,” “Christ and the Sinner,” and “Adam and Eve” (all 1917) attest to Beckmann’s interest in severe Northern Renaissance woodcuts, while the tipped space and crowded compositions anticipate his packed, compressed later works.
The show continues with the elegantly painted female portraits and incisive drawings and prints of male sitters that made the Frankfurt-based Beckmann the painter of choice for what we learn was a circle of “collectors, friends, intellectuals, and publishers” in the Weimar Republic of the early 1920s. There’s also a fleshy reclining nude who threatens to burst the confines of the canvas; still lifes as crowded as the religious scenes; and “Paris Society,” a densely painted, angry canvas of half-length men and women in evening dress, some handsome, some grotesque, pressed together in a shallow space. Unlike everything else we’ve seen, it’s the most familiar kind of Beckmann image—raw, intense, stagey and dissonant, like Kurt Weill’s music before he came to the U.S. The date “1925/1931/1947” explains the apparent anomaly. “Paris Society,” which began as a tribute to an Austrian aristocrat who supported Beckmann’s work during a sojourn in Paris, accompanied him into exile and was transformed over the years, possibly in response to the social and political upheavals of the era.
The next gallery is devoted to drypoints and lithographs published between 1914 and 1919, along with their preliminary drawings. Titles such as “Hell,” “Hunger” and “The Martyrdom” are perfectly congruent with the spiky, claustrophobically crowded figure groups, reminding us of the grim aftermath of the First World War in a defeated Germany. Other images—some clearly ironic, others suggestive of better times, several relating to nearby paintings—offer a comprehensive overview of Beckmann’s ability to extract maximum drama from scratchy lines and scribbled tones. A group of self-portrait prints and a 1922 canvas of the bullet-headed painter holding a cigarette and scowling make the artist unignorably present.
Next, we encounter a sleek self-portrait in evening dress, with a top hat and a cigar, along with a casual version with a white sailor’s cap and a cigarette, and a group of narrow paintings of multiple figures, made between 1920 and 1926, all clashing limbs and prismatic space. Tender color contrasts with the disquieting overtones of oddly costumed circus performers and people irrationally disposed in pleasure boats. One of these so-called Italian Paintings offended the Fascists when it was shown at the Venice Bienale; later included in the Degenerate Art show, it has disappeared.
There’s nothing explicitly sinister about “Family Picture” (1920) but it hardly conjures up domestic bliss. The small, loaded interior includes several older women at a table, one of them Beckmann’s mother-in-law, head in hands; the artist reclines and clutches a horn, while a child sprawls on the floor and his wife, in a red corset and with her back to us, gazes into a mirror. The fractured space and clashing planes of the room’s furnishings make the tight domestic scene vibrate with resentments.
In a tongue-in-cheek autobiography written in 1924, Beckmann described himself as “not a very nice man,” “wild about Mozart,” and having “had the bad luck not to have been endowed with a moneymaking talent, but rather with a talent for painting.” That’s good luck for visitors to “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years.”
Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.
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