The Artist is Visionary

...More than 200 paintings, drawings and prints are included, and the show is especially rich in those exalted symbolic paintings of the '30s and '40s-among them, the series of triptychs beginning with Departure (1932-33) -which are the artist's finest works...

...What was required, then, to carry the Expressionist style to its full magnitude was not only a powerful artistic gift but something almost as rare: an enlightened intellectual sophistication in perfect congruence with it...

...It therefore differed from the great movements generated by the Parisian avant-garde in one essential respect: It never became a totally art-centered style...

...For the Expressionists, modernist art was a weapon in the struggle against the moral and cultural suffocation which the aborted revolutions of the 19th century had failed to penetrate...

...Where intellect failed, and sheer expressive energy was made to do its work, artistic and sometimes even moral horrors abounded...

...But in the presence of Beckmann's great avowal to the contrary, such a notion seems more an alibi than a declaration of faith...

...He became an Expressionist despite these loyalties, not because of them...

...And even there, only in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus can one find a vision of the artist's fate in the crisis of modern history comparable to that given us by Beckmann...

...And it would be a mistake, I think, to place too "universal" an interpretation on Beckmann's vision, for that would only make it abstract in another sense...

...It leaves one more than a little appalled to realize that art at this level of ambition has been so inextricably bound up in the worst catastrophe of modern times...

...Beckmann's is the case of a great artist virtually forced into a style-and a vision of the world-by the nature of his experience...

...He emerged from the cataclysm as both a mordant satirist and a painter determined to raise his often wicked observation of the contemporary scene to the highest pictorial expression...

...The cliche image of Expressionist painting which many people carry around in their heads, and which comes very close to being confirmed whenever one encounters the grosser pictures of Heckel, Pechstein, and Schrnidt-Rottloff, is the reduction that often resulted when painterly bombast, unredeemed by the power of mind, was left to shift for itself...

...When the war came in 1914, Beckmann was already (at 30) a successful but unremarkable artist-obviously a man of immense powers but clearly indifferent to the peculiar frisson of the modern movement...

...Unlike his counterparts in Paris, who took over the Cezannean heritage for purely formal and abstract ends, Beckmann sought to make it the basis of a style that could accommodate a large spectrum of literary, psychological, and mythological material...

...ON ART By Hilton Kramer The Artist as Visionary Expressionism was born in the capitals of Northern and Central Europe where the cultural consequences of the Enlightenment met with deeper resistance than in those parts of Western Europe given over to bourgeois democracy...

...As a painter, he was a powerful constructor, but his powers in this respect were always placed at the service of the visionary for whom painting was a complex form of symbolic discourse...

...Nor has the public at large-fed, as it is, an unabated diet of esthetic novelties, contrived history, and jingoistic inanities-been allowed anything but the shadowiest acquaintance with his accomplishment...

...Yet, among artists of his rank, Beckmann's must be the least known oeuvre in modern art...

...Outside of Paris, art remained more nakedly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of culture, society and raw experience, and responded to life with greater polemical zeal...

...What we see in these late works -Beckmann died in 1950-is a Cezannean sense of plastic form applied with enormous pictorial skill and poetic intelligence to an imagery even more compelling than the artistic means by which it is created...

...For these pictures are at once a spiritual autobiography and a fable of modern culture...

...But in the postwar era, when a combination of political chaos and new artistic challenges placed even greater burdens on the Expressionist ideal, its less gifted exponents fell into decline...

...The iconographic richness of this discourse, with its careful mingling of the contemporary and the mythological, of direct observation and universal allegory, is indeed a marvel in an age that has been eager to look for less and less "content" in its pictorial art...

...It was the war, in fact, which made a modern artist of Beckmann...

...The sophisticated art audience that nowadays prides itself on being able to make fine discriminations between painters of canned soup and sculptors turning out simulated layer cakes, an audience that has lost all sense of artistic quality and is no longer troubled about the spiritual provenance of the art it consumes in ever increasing quantities, apparently cares nothing for an artist of Beckmann's stature...

...A good deal of the anguish and malaise one finds in Expressionist art-the spiritual inquietude that permeated its every artistic decision and determined its overall stylistic character-is thus traceable to the fact that the movement represented an explosive encounter between the esthetic consequences of the Enlightenment and a Europe not yet redeemed by the Enlightenment itself...

...Peter Selz has now brought to the Museum of Modern Art is an event of some importance...

...It is the artist as hero and victim, as performer and adventurer -as, ultimately, the redeemer of history-whom we see depicted in the mythic scenes of The Acrobats (1938-39) and The Actors (1941-42) and The Argonauts (1950...

...These members of the pre-World War I Br?cke circle in Germany, who were not themselves artists of impressive intellectual endowment, profited from being members of a group whose ideology brought to a pitch of self-consciousness many of the issues they would have been unable to formulate so clearly and confidently for themselves...

...Only an artist in whom the pressure of artistic energy was matched by a complexity of ideas and an uncommon moral heroism stood any chance of surviving the exigencies of the '20s and the Hitler epoch...

...One often hears it said-it is indeed the esthetic cant of our time-that art can no longer sustain a theme of such dimensions...

...As for the critics, who among them has so much as pointed out that Beckmann exists...

...Style itself, drawing upon all the innovations spawned in Paris, was conceived as an act of liberation...

...To accomplish this end, he entered into a completely new relation to modernism itself, building on the innovations first of Cezanne and then of Matisse a magnificent, tough-minded style that established him, finally, among the greatest artists of his time...

...His overt artistic loyalties were clearly elsewhere...

...It is to literature, rather than to painting-at least the painting of his contemporaries-that one must look for parallels to Beckmann's unique art...

...Beckmann entered upon his most ambitious creations while living as a condemned artist in the maelstrom of Berlin in the '30s, and continued them uninterruptedly during his exile, first in Amsterdam and then in America, in the late '30s and '40s...

...that it is only by turning inward, and concerning itself solely with esthetic sensation, that art can now speak with authority...

...Their abiding theme is the fate of the artist-or, if you will, the imagination-in the underworld of modem history...

...Its inner dialectic always contained elements originating out-side that fierce, self-enclosed arena of esthetics which, for the Parisians, was sufficiently autonomous to produce not only magnificent artistic solutions but what was perhaps of even greater importance to French art: magnificent artistic problems...

...It is therefore not out of order to speak of him as a poet, for in the great triptychs, particularly, he deployed his masterly plastic faculties with a force reminiscent of writers of epic in their strict use of prosody and rhetoric...

...It was therefore left to Max Beckmann, a latecomer to Expressionism and an artist temperamentally aloof from many of its characteristic attitudes, to raise this style to its loftiest achievement...

...Given this curious artistic atmosphere, which, so far as Beckmann is concerned, has amounted practically to a conspiracy of silence, the large retrospective exhibition that Dr...

...Less interested than the Parisians in the internal dynamics of art-and less gifted, too, at mastering its subtlest refinements-the Expressionists were visionaries who entered the esthetic arena in order to affect the very quality of life...

...Aspiring to something nobler, to an art more classical and solidly formed than anything to be found among the Briicke painters, Beckmann was nonetheless drawn into the Expressionist mode by the crisis which overtook Germany with World War 1. The grandeur of his mature style derives from his herculean-and successful-effort to make of his experience of this crisis an art on the heroic scale of the old masters, an art classic in form and yet fully encompassing the destructive history that was, perforce, its principal subject-matter...

...Certainly a great many gifted people adhere to that view, and deploy their talents accordingly...

...It was the war which plunged him, as it did Brecht, into the personal and moral crisis with which his art was thenceforth almost exclusively concerned...