Max Beckmann: On My Painting (Artists Writings)

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He also focused on etching and lithography in these years, producing several black-and-white print portfolios, including Hell —19 , which features scenes of a devastated Berlin. It was in this time of mounting terror and uncertainty that Beckmann began to paint the triptych Departure —35 , in which he has juxtaposed restraint and freedom, compression and openness, violence and refuge. Its outer panels are consumed by scenes of torture in a dimly lit theater, while in the center panel archaic figures appear on a boat in calm seas under a clear, bright sky.

In , on the day after many of his works were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition, Beckmann left for Amsterdam, where he lived during World War II.

Exhibitions

He remained active in exile, turning to mythic, parabolic images unmoored from a particular time or place. In , he was able to immigrate to America, where he taught in St. Louis and New York.

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For access to motion picture film stills please contact the Film Study Center. More information is also available about the film collection and the Circulating Film and Video Library. By choosing to represent these painters in a group portrait, Beckmann illuminated two modes of painting decisively different from his own concerns with creating a transcendental world. His reference to both abstract art and realistic painting can thus be understood as a means of emphasizing his outsider status and his belief in an individualistic artistic practice positioned in between abstraction and figuration.

The German philosopher Wolfgang Frommel had more in common with Beckmann. Frommel, whose radio program included Jewish authors, took a stance in between acquiescence and resistance.

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His programmatic publication The Third Humanism exposes a utopian-reactionary notion of the world. Devoid of anti-Semitism, it assumes an elitist intellectual position.

Like Beckmann, Frommel privileged spiritual values, which he attempted to set against the visible world of National Socialism. Yet he also shared beliefs with the Nazis: In the summer of he was denounced, and in he left Germany for Amsterdam, where he worked for publishers and also sheltered Jews.

He is undoubtedly the most important exile depicted in this painting, a point emphasized by the golden frame surrounding his head. This historicist reference can be seen as an attempt to assimilate with northern culture, although not with contemporary art as it was then practiced in the Netherlands.

Max Beckmann

Seventeenth-century northern art had been held in high esteem by German collectors and museums since the founding of the German Reich in Beckmann was certainly aware of this. Instead Beckmann constructed a discourse that ambiguously alternates between creating a fictitious narrative and representing individual German exiles. All four are known to have lived as exiles in the Netherlands, where they shared a common fate, and their sitting together around a table suggests a probable situation.

Other elements of the composition underscore their individuality. The figure of Beckmann, for example, avoids any visible interaction with the others that would suggest a narrative line.

In addition, the white tablecloth, the large candle in its center, and the attributive character of the objects that the exiles hold in their hands establish a religious or at least pseudo-religious context, elevating the meeting into a transcendental realm in which Frommel again takes center stage, as he seems to be dressed as a priest. Centre Pompidou , ed. Piper, , 44, 50, 52, 53, Saint Louis Art Museum; Munich: Prestel, , ; Charles W.

Louis , by Joseph D.

Abrams, ; and Klaus-Peter Schuster, ed. Barbara Copeland Buenger Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , —

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