Exile on Central Park West

John Haber
in New York City

Max Beckmann: After the War and in New York

Max Beckmann has finally made it to the Met. It only took him a lifetime after he was already dead. First, though, he had a stop in hell on his way to success.

He had returned home from World War I in his thirties, a mature artist and a broken man. His service as a medical orderly had ended prematurely, in metal and physical collapse, but his success had only just begun. He found a ready market for his portraits in the freedom and sophistication of Weimar Germany. He found a subject, too, in the degradations he had witnessed and could not escape now. The Neue Galerie sees just eight years as a key to his more iconic later work. His mythic narratives arose, it argues, from the pleasures and poverty before his eyes.

He was sixty-six years later when he set off to cross Central Park exactly that many years before a show at the Met, only to die of a heart attack along the way. He had lived here all of two years, even counting a summer away in Oakland, where he taught at Mills College. Even then, apparently, he could not support himself entirely through his art. Yet the museum considers it the end of the German artist's many years of exile. He had an apartment on the Upper West Side, a job at the Brooklyn Museum's art school, and a haunt or two in lavish hotel bars. He had found, he wrote, his long lamented prewar Berlin "multiplied a hundredfold."

It takes chutzpah to imagine him at home anywhere, much less New York. The dozen paintings from those months rarely picture the city, and they have landed pretty much anywhere but here. Yet they and that dark December day in 1950 supply the excuse for "Max Beckmann in New York" at the Met for real. Without them, it would amount to a small survey drawn from local collections, with their share of gaps and no other local connection. They do, though, show an artist always in society and yet always in exile. They show him as, once again, a mythmaker and a realist, with himself at the center of reality and the myth.

His own private hell

New York got a good look at Beckmann in 2003, on what was just his most recent museum retrospective. One could call it political art, I wrote then, a long way from the gentility of Gustav Klimt in prewar Vienna, but his allegories never quite reveal their key. One could call it German Expressionism, but he himself would not, and his images rarely give up their sober colors, solid outlines, and mythic past. One could almost call it Modernism, but the tortured narratives, thick bodies, and grim faces scorn such experiments as well. A more recent exhibition took Beckmann into exile, as you will see in a moment, soon before his death. With your indulgence, I leave a fuller account to my reviews at the time, with more on his style, images, and career.

The Neue Galerie, in turn, offers not a survey, but a substantial correction. It gives space to prints and drawings, at least half the show's one hundred works. That is not a failing, because they were a big part of his output. Subjects could sit for them quickly and gain less costly access to his allegories, almost like the public for graphic novels today. And Beckmann responded to demand with large prints. He also, it turns out, was not just darkening his line with the medievalism of woodcuts. At least as often, he took to drypoint for quick, light hatching—finding echoes in the shocking skin tones of his paintings.

He could not let go of crushing memories. He sketches a morgue, a hospital, and open latrines. Nor could he stop looking. Cripples and beggars lay splayed or hunched on the street. Prints show the rising class that he deplored and with which he identified—those who sat for his portraits and attended the same supper clubs and carnivals. From past shows, you may know his early bathers after Paul Cézanne or later Vikings on a voyage of conquest. The wealthy, it turns out, could always rent a boat for the day.

It could not have been easy to enjoy each other's company. You may remember Beckmann's subjects as larger than life, himself included. Here, though, they pack the picture plane, with the lowest often upside down. It is only a step from an early Descent from the Cross to a carnival act. They hardly acknowledge one another as well—not even Adam and Eve at the temptation, where their tempter looks less like a serpent than a wolf. Jesus gestures to his followers as if putting them off.

Color comes as a corrective, too, to typical accounts of so dark an artist. It also came with success. One can see why he became the go-to guy for portraits. He does not have to flatter the new leisure class, not when he himself could aspire to a felt intelligence and self-possession. Maybe that is why they need few attributes, but Beckmann needs his tuxedo, cigarette, and horn. Art itself must have lifted him out of a breakdown.

He began teaching at the academy in Frankfurt, in 1925, and exhibited in Mannheim with the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Had he distanced himself from Expressionism or given it a lasting model, and what kind of "objectivity" could comport with his growing interest in theosophy? He still had to face the collapse of the republic. Yet the exhibition comes to an end well before the Nazis came to power, confiscated his art, and sent him packing. By then, it is hard to distinguish his Family Picture from his Dream. He had long since survived boredom, banality, and his own private hell.

Richard III in the drawing room

Beckmann was crossing town to see his very own image, in an exhibition of contemporary American art. If the subject and year make you think of other exiles, such as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, just then breaking through to Abstract Expressionist New York, forget it. He commands the scene in a white tie, reddish orange shirt, and even more startling blue jacket. Its loose fit and the hand slipped casually into his right pants pocket only emphasize his ease and presence. As so often, a slashing black picks out the folds, and the acid colors extend to green, for a foreground table or chair. As so often, too, a more subdued and sparely painted background frames him but cannot trap him. Highlights bring out his roving eyes and high forehead.

The portrait faces the entrance wall, in a room of Beckmann's self-portraits. They surround visitors on every side, almost always with those cool or clashing skin tones, restless eyes, and a cigarette. The curator, Sabine Rewald, sees in them a vulnerable, even introspective character. She calls him fragile compared to the bulk of his blue jacket. Do not believe it for a minute, not even when he holds an outsize horn to his ear like a hearing aid for a virtuoso. He is both taking you in and putting on a show.

He is Richard III for a modern-day drawing room. As a child in a 1949 triptych, Beginning, he wears a paper crown. The crown transfers to a Viking at the center of another triptych and probably his most famous work, Departure from 1933, in the Museum of Modern Art since 1942. The Viking king, his queen, and their infant child are at sea, between scenes of unspeakable torture, while a drummer marches past to commemorate their fate. Are they in exile or relentless invaders, tormented or tormentors, in a mythic past or a frightening historical present? The question applies to everyone and everything he sees.

For the record, he had a round face and pot belly right to the end. If not exactly fragile, he at least subjects himself to the same comic irony as others. It only furthers his detachment and refusal to look within. In each panel of Beginning, he plays the rebel unaware of own arrogance—on a hobby horse, passing on a nude drawing in class, or in that crown. Beckmann, though, is always self-aware. He places the child in the crown outside a window, gawking at a hurdy-gurdy player with a greater claim to artifice. He does nothing at that to identify the child once and for all with himself.

The two triptychs wrap up the show, just as they have come to wrap up German Expressionism, "degenerate art," and Nazi-looted art as attested by Edmund de Waal. They also supply a handy guide to his imagery. They include the brutality of masked executioners and severed hands. They include the haute bourgeoisie in teachers and a parade of outcasts in the drummer and hurdy-gurdy man. Both, they seem to say, are false prophets. They include victims willing to accept the prophecy.

They include cramped spaces and open waters, with the occupants of both figuratively at sea. They include figures piled vertically or suspended upside-down, in tiers that trap them that much further. They include bright colors and the thick black outlines out of crude woodcuts, often approaching a grid. They defy belief, even as they defy anyone to dismiss the horror. They slip nonchalantly between the artist's classroom or studio and the larger world, tragedy and comedy. The upside-down figure in Beginning is a cat.

Carnival in the city

If that makes you think of cat pictures on the Internet, the Met would like you to consider Beckmann a prophet, if only inadvertently. It sees a theater's backstage devoid of people, from his last year, as a foretaste of death. It sees a falling man beside a skyscraper as a foretaste of 9/11 and Ground Zero. Never mind. He keeps coming back to the same vocabulary, with few variations, to hammer it home. He keeps coming back, too, for all his moves from city to city.

The show runs neither thematically nor chronologically—a far cry from the 2003 Beckmann retrospective at MoMA Qns. It never so much as gives his year of birth, 1884, and it never mentions his harrowing service in World War I or his breakdowns. It has its self-portraits, like Paula Modersohn-Becker, then fashionable portraits of others, and a side room for visions of hell. Those include the falling man. So much for being at home in the city. It has its final room for four reclining women, his "muses," and the triptychs.

In-between, though, it nods to a survey. It picks up Beckmann only in 1920, in Frankfurt, as the Weimar Republic briefly stabilizes along with the currency. Not that he cares much for stability. In a family scene, figures acknowledge only themselves—lost in a mirror, a book, a newspaper, a candle, a sullen dominance, or despair. On a boat for his honeymoon, the party badly needs a rescue. Wall text dutifully describes his wife, Quappi, as delicate and graceful, but he gives her the gravity and mass of a totem or a woman for Pablo Picasso.

He moves back to Berlin in 1933, just as Hitler comes to power, and departs in 1937, on his way to Paris. He never gets there. He uses his ten years in Amsterdam to recreate glamorous evenings in Paris and Berlin. In the rootlessness and posturing of high society, he is for once at home. A teaching gig in Saint Louis takes him to the United States and, a year later, his final stop in New York. Props on the floor of his last studio take the place of his bulky nudes and dismembered arms. A hotel bar tunnels into depth between paired mirrors—surely the closest he ever comes to a subway car.

Had Beckmann finally escaped his nightmares? Not likely, no more than Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Switzerland, but neither had he forgotten the comedy or the realism. The San Francisco skyline looks about to topple in the breeze. A cloud besets the falling man in New York, like a sky god, and ships on the Hudson fly upward in reply. A city night supplies another vision of hell, but with musicians to accompany it—and more than one opportunity for sex. An optician's shop window on the Lower East Side holds schematic eyeglasses, but also a bust with its eyes behind a mask.

To the very end, his carnival sports masks—and those crazy colors. Is art a carnival all along? Faced with the grim spectacle, I often wish that Beckmann could get over his exile. Stop exaggerating, I want to scream, and just calm down. Maybe, though, he already has. He can always put on a blue jacket, formal wear, or a sailor suit and invite you to his studio, so long as you do not expect a welcome.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Max Beckmann ran at the Neue Galerie through January 15, 2024. "Max Beckmann in New York" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 20, 2017. A related article looks more fully at Beckmann in retrospective.