Max Beckmann “Self-Portrait With White Cap, 1926,” at the Neue Galerie in New York. His sober and analytical gaze was an artistic project born from disastrous war and political disenchantment. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Christie’s Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
“I have been drawing,” Beckmann wrote to his wife one evening, after a day caring for men who’d survived the trenches. “That protects one from death and danger.”
Though he never served at the front, Beckmann had a nervous breakdown by the end of 1915. The war went on, but Beckmann, now in Frankfurt, began painting biblical scenes with nightmarish directness: a sharp-angled “Descent from the Cross” …
Condemned by the Third Reich as a “degenerate” artist, he spent his later life in the Netherlands and eventually the United States…
Max Beckmann, “Paris Society,” which he began in 1925 and reworked in 1931 and again in 1947. The show reveals how the expressionism of the early 1900s would be distilled into the hard-boiled objectivity of the Weimar years. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Beckmann did not depict the war head-on. He preferred satire, effrontery, and a certain artistic sacerdotalism…
Max Beckmann, “In the Tram,” a Berlin public transport scene from 1922. The shallow spaces and hard angles Beckmann initially applied to Christian motifs get reapplied to acid views of Weimar society. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Drypoint Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The more urgent paintings and prints here are those that hold fast to the greatest virtue of German art of the years after World War I: Sachlichkeit, or “objectivity,” a view of society purged of emotion, which saw the substance of things on their surfaces.
Beckmann’s “Trapeze,” 1923, shows acrobats tumbling one over the other in a hopelessly failed circus act. Credit…Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Toledo Museum of Art. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Jason Farago, “For Max Beckmann, Art’s Ironist, Crisis and Rediscovery,” New York Times, 11-10-23)
I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.
EthicalDative 