Weimar Lives!
DISCH, THOMAS M.
Weimar Lives! German expressionism in New York today. BY THOMAS M. DISCH German painters are often hard to like, and the best of them can be the least amiable. Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece is...
...Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic...
...Blavatsky's system suited his purpose exactly, allowing him to strike portentous poses, as sage and mystic, and then cloak himself in mythopoeic fog...
...Beck-mann consciously begs comparison with both Michelangelo's Last Judgment and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa...
...Despite his ringside seat at world history—he was persecuted by the Nazis, stuck in Amsterdam from 1937 through 1947, and out of the loop from other celebrity exiles in America— Beckmann's bio is not the stuff of legends...
...This is no Guernica, a pacifist tract in oils...
...In July he was invalided out of the service by virtue of a nervous breakdown, and in short order he was producing the first paintings of the Beckmann canon, an Adam and Eve, a Deposition, and a Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery...
...Beckmann's chief apologist, and the curator of the latest Beckmann show, Robert Storr, offers in the introduction to the exhibition's catalogue the usual postmodern apology of aporia for the intellectual incoherence of Beckmann's paintings: "In every respect their elusive symbols and taut but unstable pictorial structure juxtapose antithetical terms . . . There is no prospect that the painter will release the viewers from the discomfort these contradictions may cause or shortcut their engagement by easing the tension or handing over the keys to his semiotic codes...
...Check out his 1906 Small Death Scene (painted at age twenty-two): a family, all in mourning, whose very faces have been effaced by grief...
...He did not endure it very long...
...His brushwork and knotty compositions were enough for his contemporaries to suppose, at a glance, that whatever he was saying must reflect their own thoughts and opinions...
...Out at the museum's temporary setting in Queens, Beckmann is featured through September 29...
...This is Everyman and his family being savaged by Everyman and his henchmen...
...If you are still young enough yourself to be responsive to primal howling in primary colors, then you should head for the Neue Gallerie on Fifth Avenue, which is hosting German Expressionism through September 15...
...that saints, even Jesus Himself, may look demented...
...his Eve is naked rather than nude, an incitement not to eat the apple...
...Even more than that lot, however, Beckmann seemed intent from an early age to paint the bleakest, bluntest, murkiest vision of human life his brush could scrub on canvas...
...By the same token he consistently bad-mouthed Picasso and Matisse and every other French artist younger than van Gogh...
...his companion, eyes hidden by his visored cap, glowers...
...But he is accounted the German painter of the twentieth century by those in charge of such scoreboards, and little as I like the man I can sense behind the pictures, the scorekeepers may be right...
...Rather, he depicts himself as bon vivant, as sailor, as musician, as clown—always with the same stony face, and the same wonderfully expressive, blunt-fingered hands...
...The central torturer is a pipe-smoking businessman with a bandaged head...
...Beckmann denied being an "Expressionist," out of a regard for the singularity of his genius...
...the festive geometries of the Blue Rider group: Kandinsky, Marc, Jawlen-sky...
...no one would ever have guessed painter, and only in the very early Self-Portrait with Red Scarf did he represent himself in that role...
...But no one more completely embodied the Zeitgeist of Expressionism...
...Or Beckmann...
...In all these respects, Max Beck-mann is the most German of Germans, and the Museum of Modern Art has been consistent in promoting him as its favorite German modernist...
...For decades afterward the little yellow catalogue for that show haunted my bookshelves, daring me to declare myself a philistine by disliking him...
...There are excellent artists from all nations who are characteristically dour, morose, emotionally chill, or otherwise thorny: Rouault, Soutine, Giacometti, Rothko, Bacon—to mention a few who are not German...
...One can't imagine anyone ever making a movie of the life, and I doubt he'd have been a good companion at the dinner table...
...The style is faux naive, but the thrust of the painting is ambiguous...
...Had he appeared on What's My Line...
...Beckmann's hands are just the opposite...
...Despite a predilection for liturgical art (both for the grand scale of altarpieces, as well as the fact that it could function as an object of adoration), he was no Christian, unless Madame Blavatsky's brand of theosophy counts...
...After those three paintings from 1917, Beckmann did not often take on explicitly religious themes but chose to depict the cruelties of the world in allegorical tableaux of his own invention...
...Yet what makes these paintings stick in the craw of memory is a quality they share with the imagery of Grunewald and Breughel: their insistence that spiritual truths must have their roots in human frailty...
...the buccaneering brushwork of Nolde and Kirchner...
...Mannerists of all ages, from El Greco to Sargent, vaunted themselves on elegance in the handicraft of crafting hands, usually by emphasizing delicacy and a graceful limpness...
...It shows a mildly cubist garret room in which a family is being tortured, the father simultaneously garroted and having his arm broken, the mother bound and raped, a daughter pleading for mercy...
...But for the short span of the Weimar Republic, Beckmann was applauded as the new Durer, the artist who defined the Germanness of German art...
...The whole lot of them are dark of palette and squeamish about flesh, if not altogether allergic...
...This did not much diminish his accomplishment as a painter of landscapes, still-lifes, and self-portraits, but it represents a great stumbling block in approaching what he and his disciples considered his masterpieces...
...He avoided the kind of dubious celebrity granted to Picasso and Dali, and limped through his last years in the United States, the relic of an unfashionable era the whole world was trying to forget...
...The Christ being taken down from the cross is skeletally gaunt and warped by rigor mortis, while the mourners at the scene are gnomes from a children's storybook...
...It was a role he gloried in, and played with insufferable pomposity...
...He had few followers here and no sympathy for the abstract expressionists, who were enjoying the noon of their success when Beckmann died of a heart attack on his way to the Metropolitan Museum in 1950...
...Or what we might call his "Big Death Scene," the Sinking of the Titanic from 1912...
...Even such a Nazi sympathizer as Emil Nolde found himself interdicted just because he was an Expressionist...
...Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece is the ghastliest of Old Master paintings, and there are entire galleries in both Hanover and Munich devoted to the martyrdoms of hecatombs of suffering saints as depicted by the meistermalers of old Germany...
...This is not to say that Beckmann can't be interpreted, only that one must seek other decoder rings than the ones he provides...
...Zeitgeist embodiers have a different and lesser fame than geniuses...
...These allegorical fantasmago-rias, often in triptych form, cobble together Jungian archetypes, S&M scenarios, and circus theatrics in a mix that would set the standard for a style of High Bohemian Pomp for decades to come...
...On May 24, 1915, he wrote, "Everywhere I discover deep lines of beauty in the suffering and endurance of this terrible fate...
...Beckmann could never leave off gazing into a mirror at the mystery of himself...
...For years he prospered, without once smiling...
...that legendary temptresses might pass for streetwalkers...
...But Beckmann is another story...
...In Beckmann's case, that message was: SOS...
...They are the blunt instruments that have created his paintings, in much the same way (we might imagine) as Shakespeare's Lavinia spells out the names of her rapists, using her bleeding stumps...
...He married twice, the second time to a chic and adoring manager of a wife, Quappi...
...There is no allegory involved, simply an urgent declaration, congruent with the other elements of his style, that he is dealing in elemental matters: blood and guts, sex and violence—id stuff...
...Beckmann spent the first months of World War I on the Belgian front with an appetite for all the horrors he could witness...
...They are a bit like idiot savants, capable of prodigious feats of artistry for which they don't seem entirely responsible...
...Perhaps Beckmann's most significant paintings are his self-portraits, which the Museum of Modern Art's show features in all its publicity material...
...It helped that he did not have a political agenda...
...It was no fault of his politics that Nazis would eventually feature his paintings as the chief exemplars of "Degenerate Art" and confiscate hundreds of his canvases from all over Germany (his success during the 1920s had been meteoric, his production prodigious...
...The first full-scale effort along these lines, and probably his most memorable work, is The Night of 1918-19...
...The German Expressionists had the energy and audacity of teenage garage bands and the ephemeral messiness, too...
...In any case, he certainly knew how to paint, and this second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is worth the trip to Queens...
...In short, that history is a long nightmare endlessly repeated—a lesson that not a few artists took from the carnage of the Great War...
...He was not a very good-looking fellow, thickening at an early age into the stereotype of a German burgher—with, in all his photographs, a stolid, glowering gaze...
...Or Warhol...
...No one can approach them for expressing the gist of their era...
...The painting is as turbulent—and unfeel-ing—as the climactic auto chase in a Vin Diesel movie...
...All three are grotesque variations on traditional Christian iconography in a style that might be called faux echt Deutsch...
...In other words, Storr can't unriddle these "allegories" any better than the rest of us, and he won't be drawn into trying to do so...
...His Adam is bug-eyed but not at all well-endowed...
...But what separates Beckmann from his predecessors is the absence, among all his tumbled figures, of expressive faces or significant body language...
...Who could decide to be Watteau...
...And back in 1964, fourteen years after his death, the museum offered a Beckmann retrospective...
...They are the ripe fruit of their time and place, effortlessly prolific, but rather dull in servings as large as a retrospective, for they have, essentially, one message...
...As it happens, I did like other painters of the same era and tenden-cy—Klee for his playful scrimshaws...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 1
