Birds' Hell

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...

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Things like the following do happen to me: out of the blue one day I had the thought to google the words "Max Beckmann straw". Just very suddenly I had those words in mind, without any idea as to why.

And in the box to the right that has a collection of images, I saw a painting by Beckmann that I had never seen before, to my delight, (because, believe me, I have exhausted the search engine in finding new Beckmann paintings, and here and there I still find new ones) and so clicked on it, to find that the painting was by someone else, a woman who was a student of Beckmann back in Germany.

The word "straw" brought me to this article on the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, owing to the word in both Self-Portait with Straw Hat (the image I mistook as being by Beckmann) and in the telling of how Motesiczky came to meet Max Beckmann:

During the summer of 1920, the German artist Max Beckmann, introduced by a family member, paid a visit to the Motesiczky’s.  By playfully entertaining the teenager with an impromptu dinner skit involving a piece of straw dipped in wine, he enthralled the 14-year-old Marie-Louise with his personality, and later his art, laying the foundation for their deep and lasting friendship.

One of the things about knowing Beckmann's work by eye is that you can easily tell a work that is by someone else closely imitating him, just like the way you can tell a work is not by Van Gogh, though the artist has employed his style and bent with great earnestness.

But with this lady I had been foiled! I thought for sure it was by Beckmann, and I was astonished to see further images by Motesiczky. While you can start to tell how they are different from Beckmann after some acquaintance, I had to remark that the close adoption of Beckmann's manner of painting seemed to disclose something somewhat disquieting, if not disturbing.

Reading a bit more about her life, it would seem there was a  disposition to want to be deeply coloured by the men in her life, as would seem to be evidenced by the pinning of her happiness on an affair with a writer later in her life, which was also, alas, her misery. This was perhaps compounded by her mother taking her away from potential suitors early in her life.

Anyways, I like the way her painting developed, her paintings of her mother.

Motesiczky made one of the most beautiful statements any artist has made about their work and its purpose:

"My longing is to paint beautiful pictures, to become happy in doing so, and to make other people happy through them."

That is saying a lot more than one may realize.

Now that you know something about her, maybe say a prayer for her soul. Maybe that was the reason I was led to read about her and share her work.

And say a prayer for Beckmann and Quappi too and Beckmann's first wife Minna.

Max Monday

Self-Portrait with Champagne Glass, By Max Beckmann - 1919

"Every one of his works has the mystery of being human as its undertone. It is not flaunted, but it is a constant presence. Grosz, who had shared many of Beckmann's feelings, had resorted to the savagery of caricature. Beckmann, a greater artist and a more balanced man, came near it but did not fall over that dangerous edge. Self-Portrait with Champagne Glass is the nearest he got to self-pity or mockery. The man behind the partition, the happy man, the one who could feel at home in the world of post-war Germany - he is a figure that recalls the bitter cartoons of Grosz. Our attention is instead on Beckmann himself, the man who does not fit into this wounded society, but who must nonetheless appear to take his place. He forces a smile, his lips writhing in what he hopes will pass as a welcoming gesture. The falsity is painful, and so is his bodily position, squashed against the bar in a world of no-space. His celebratory drink is for holding, not for enjoying: it belongs by right to the space of the man it toasts, the man behind, the man who belongs. The champagne bottle neck lunges at the artist like a small field gun, hemming him in with its pretence of happiness. Even his clothes are subtly wrong, too short in the arm, and the arm itself seems ill-formed. Beckmann shows himself as a death's head, with livid skull, sunken eyes, skeletal fingers. It is 1919, and he is coping, but barely." --Sister Wendy Beckett, Max Beckmann and the Self

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Still Life with Three Skulls - By Max Beckmann, 1945

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"...I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture." --Max Beckmann

Photo: Max teaching in Brooklyn. My favourite photo of him.

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I came across this painting by Max Beckmann some time ago online,

and there was no title with it. I assumed it was Christ expelling the demons from Mary Magdalene.

I came across the title recently on a site. It is Christ in Limbo.

Funny how an image can do that - receive multiple interpretations. Though really, it better explains the crown of thorns that Christ is wearing.

Anyways, you know what I like to think about?

I like to think about how this painting,

is conducive to a church setting, or to a sacred space, and more conducive to a sacred space than this painting:

Decadent mannerism. Bronzino's Christ in Limbo in a sacred setting (in any setting for that matter) would be spiritually erosive, but not Beckmann's.

Because Bronzino's is absolutely vacuous it is detrimental to any sort of contemplation on the subject depicted, and thus a kind of blockage, a kind of lie, is set up nice and fashionable-like. Well, fashionable for its time, which is precisely the problem. That's all the painting is. Fashionable for its time, and thus even for its time it was erosive and vacuous.

Beckmann's is crackling with intensity - a coarse intensity, yes - but, to put it shortly, it reveals an invisible reality. He is not doing a "take" on the subject; rather the subject as a painted image has become a channel for the real. As such, the subject becomes real on a visceral level.

Oh and if you're thinking I'm saying this because of the nude on the right side of Bronzino's image, you don't get what I'm saying.

But it is good to think about, isn't it? The truth that this painting by Max Beckmann,

is very much conducive to a sacred space, to a church, and far more conducive than this painting:

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Sunrise - by Max Beckmann

Landscape, Saint Germain - by Max Beckmann

B

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Large Still Life with Fish, by Max Beckmann

Stillleben mit Fischen, by Max Beckmann

Aquarium, by Max Beckmann

Sleeping Woman with Fish Bowl, by Max Beckmann

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Max Beckmann made some sculptures, which Quappi cast in bronze after he died (click to enlarge):

Female Dancer, 1935

Back Bend, 1950

Man in the Dark, 1934

Crouching Woman, 1935

Adam and Eve, 1936

Snake Charmer, 1950




Image source

Max Monday

The King - By Max Beckmann (click to enlarge)

"We can trace the the change in Beckmann's awareness of his true self in the two versions of The King, done in 1933 and 1937. This is the artist in familiar clownish costume, but wearing the royal crown. In the earlier version, which we now only know through a photograph, he has still immense self-possession. He sits on a severe throne, flanked by women - the clinging young beauty, the ominous old sage. He is supported by a pillar to the right and an open expanse to the left. His eyes survey us gravely but calmly. If there is anxiety, it is behind him, where he cannot see it; the hooded woman regards him with foreboding, and we deduce (this is 1933, remember) that trouble may be on the way. In 1937, the trouble has come, darkening the scene, frightening the woman, causing the king to draw himself up to encounter his fate. Beckmann grew increasingly addicted to the black line, a heavy outline for his images, as if to make their impact inescapable. This can become almost a savage underlining, as here, where parts of the picture thicken with ominous significance. The old woman has darkened into an overcast profile, with shadowed hand warding off approaching evil. The girl has moved from before the throne to a strangely intimate position between the king's legs. She clasps him, terrified, gently immobilising his hands. And who is the king? Beckmann disguised? His noble head is practically unreadable: this is his own private affair. What is shown is his attitude, one of sovereign control. No clown's dress can make a fool of a true king, and if his escape seems barred in all directions by bizarre obstacles, he is undeterred. With its deeply glowing colours and rich, positive lines and blurs of black, this is one of Beckmann's most memorable achievements" --Sister Wendy Beckett, Max Beckmann and the Self

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I love this photo.

The security man seems to be telling the person "no pictures", and way down the passageway beyond a number of thresholds, there is Max Beckmann's monumental unfinished Resurrection of the Dead.

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 (Click to enlarge)

Party in Paris -- Max Beckmann, 1931 (reworked in 1947)


"When Renaissance or Impressionist artists portrayed a group of people, they generally gave them a vectorial coherence: faces were directed toward the spectator standing before the canvas, toward a common focus - as in Rembrandt's Night Watch - or toward a sports event or other spectacle. Beckmann, however, shows a fragmented society, a gathering of uncommitted individuals. This gives the group an air of slight decadence. Each character is not only unique, but convinced of his own uniqueness. These people experience no genuine communication; each is wrapped up in his or her own significance. Beckmann's sharp, critical eye has registered that at a party of this sort exactly as many heads are turned away from each other as there are faces pretending to notice others. And not a single face is turned toward the poor singer in the background!

The citizens Beckmann presents are obviously important, intelligent, polished, wealthy, and interesting in their own way. Counteracting the satirical intent is the flawless elegance of their dinner jackets and haute couture. The male custom of dressing in black dinner jacket, stiff white shirt, and black tie had become quasi-universal in those years. Films of the period show it to be practically the uniform of "good society" after dusk. Yet it is surprising how rarely the tuxedo found its way into major works of art. Despite the fact that its simple black-and-white contrast lent itself easily to treatment in the woodcut medium, and that woodcuts, in turn, frequently dealt with social criticism at the time, Beckmann may be the only painter who depicted the tuxedo in a straightforward manner. In this way the black-and-white male attire served him in Self-Portrait in Tuxedo of 1927 and in The Loge of 1928. Later on evening clothes acquired sinister connotations: the singing angels in Death (1938) and the Minotaur in Blindman's Buff (1945) make these garments appear very macabre. The dinner jackets in Party seem to evoke just a trace of awe." --Stephan Lackner

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Resting Woman with Carnations - Max Beckmann

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Max Beckmann - Die Landschaft, Cannes

Max Beckmann - Harbor by Bandol (Gray) and Palms

Max Beckmann - Beaulieu

Max Beckmann - Promenade des Anglais à Nice

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Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles

"Here again, black is the dominant color and sets the tragic mood. In contrast to the Cubists who would transform a woman with a guitar into a still life, Beckmann endows his still lifes with human qualities. The table here has become a stage and no shadows are allowed to obscure the austere integrity of the mysterious event. This simple still life, like Cezanne's Black Clock, is a memento mori: the two largest candles are fallen heroes, while the other two stand in mourning, guarding against the "dark black hole" of space and infinity behind them. Indeed, a year later he painted a similar composition on a larger scale and introduced a book - a script as it were - with the word "Eternity" on its title page." --Peter Selz

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles and Mirror

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Max Beckmann, Riviera-Landschaft

Max Beckmann, Blick auf Vorstädte am Meer bei Marseille

Max Beckmann, Seascape with Agaves and Old Castle

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View of Genoa - Max Beckmann

NachtGarten - Max Beckmann