Max Monday

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a great online documentation of a recent restoration of Beckmann's masterpiece "Blind Man's Buff" (my personal favourite of his triptychs). They have several sub-topics to peruse on the site relating to the work itself, to Beckmann and to the restoration. Very interesting.

And here is one of the best biographical sketches I've read about Beckmann, by Dr. Harold Joachim.

Here's a good part:

His art, too, may at first appear blunt and aggressive, but those who study it will soon discover not only a profound visionary mind, but one of the most sensitive hands in modern art, a hand not only of a master draftsman who had been able to compress the diversity of the visible world into a hieroglyphic language of his own, but also of a master painter who was highly sensitive to surface texture and color relationships. It is no wonder that these qualities, so rare among German Expressionists, gained him the respect, if not the love, of the French.

Although he is now universally considered one of the major figures of German Expressionism, Beckmann himself disdained any such classification...

Tanka

Memory of rain
revives in the somnolent
head of mid-summer.
From the ground sweetness rises,
inebriates nostrils, stings.

Title: Their Eyes Were Opened

Medium: Oil on canvas paper

Size: 12in. x 16 in.

Three Haiku (unlinked)

The car's patina -
netted, dented, olive-swathed.
No road comes near here.

*

Forest's sun-struck floor:
hosanna ferns, in noon wind,
froth with a lightness.

*

Summer's dusk mountain
is listening, purple snow.
The fields fall silent.

Icon - Christ the Bridegroom

New Favourite