Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
25 October 2018 to 27 January 2019
CaixaForum’s exhibition space in Barcelona,
21 February to 26 May 2019.
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting Beckmann. Exile figures, the first exhibition in Spain in twenty years to be devoted to the a rtist, one of the most important of the 20 th century.
While close to New Objectivity at the outset o f his career, Max Beckmann (Leipzig, 1884 – New York, 1950) created a unique and independent ty pe of painting, realist in style but filled with symbolic resonances, which came to constitut e a vigorous account of society of his day. Following its display at the Museo Thyssen, where i t is sponsored by the Comunidad de Madrid, it will travel to CaixaForum’s exhibition space in Barcelona, from 21 February to 26 May 2019.
Curated by Tomàs Llorens the exhibition will feature a total of 52 works, principally paintings but also sculptures and lithographs, loaned from museums and collections worldwide and including some of the artist’s most important creations, such as
The Boat (1926),
Paris Society, 1931. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York /
Society, Paris (1931),
Self-Portrait with Horn , 1938. Neue Galerie, New York, and private collection /
Self- portrait with Horn (1938),
City. Night in the City (1950), Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May
and The Argonauts (1949-50), the triptych that Beckmann finished on the day he died at a relatively early age in New York.
The exhibition is structured into two sections. The first, smaller one is devoted to the artist’s time in Germany from the years prior to World War I when he began to achieve public recognition, to the rise of Nazism in 1933 when Beckmann was stripped of his post at the Frankfurt art school and was banned from exhibiting in public. Works displayed in this section have been chosen for their significance and importance within the artist’s oeuv e.
In the second, larger section, which spans the years in Amsterdam (1937-47) and the United States (1947-50) where he settled after he was obliged to leave Germany, the works have been selected using a thematic criterion: exile, both in its literal sense with regard to Beckmann’s own life, and figurative, in reference to the significance it had for the artist as the basic condition of human existence in general.
As a result, his allegorical paintings – to which he devoted most time and effort (all his triptychs and large-format canvases are allegorical compositions) – are the most extensively represented in the exhibition. The portraits, landscapes and still lifes, traditional genres in which Beckmann worked throughout his career, have also been chosen for their allegorical resonances.
This part of the exhibition is structured around four metaphors relating to exile:
Masks , which focuses on the loss of identity associated with the circumstances of exile;
Electric Babylon , on the vertiginous modern city as the capital of exile;
The long goodbye , which looks at the parallel between exile and death; and
The Sea , a metaphor of the infinite, its seduction and alienation.
A German painter in a bewildering Germany
The conviction that German art had its own character, different to that of France or Italy, was profoundly rooted in the artists of Beckmann’s generation whose sensibility was oriented towards the “emotion of life” rather than ideal beauty. This trait, repressed and inexplicit for centuries, started to re-emerge during the modern era in parallel to Germany’s new social and economic rise. With defeat in World War I, however, the new confidence and self-esteem disappeared and was replaced by an acute awareness of crisis while in the field of art naturalism was replaced by Expressionism. Beckmann’s early painting is eclectic in style.
In addition to Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, his work of this period recalls other German artists of the previous generation. The most important long-lasting influence, however, was that of Cézanne and Beckmann’s concern to combine the representation of volume s with the two-dimensional surface of the canvas would be one of his principal obsessions throughout his career.
Beckmann believed that there was no such things as a new painting based on new theoretical principles: for him, the different personalities of artists represented the only new element in art. His interest in allaying himself with the great tradition of European painting became the principal aim of his work during his initial period, leading him to challenge the avant-garde of the Expressionist painters of his day. His profound rejection of the collective, sectarian and doctrinal aspect of these mov ements provided the basis of his individualist position agai nst all the collective art trends that he encountered during the course of his life.
“The great orchestra of mankind lies in the city” During the early years of his career Beckmann devised a new type of painting that was realist and “of the moment”. It brought him initial success and began to be recognised in art circles of the day. He would become fully established with his first monographic exhibition in 1913. That same year he introduced a new theme into his painting: street scenes of Berlin that evoke the metropolitan character of the big city.
While already adopted by the Futurists and Expressionists, Beckmann’s focus on this subject was notably different, offering an objective vision through the gaze of the painter as fas cinated witness to its agitation. The following years were marked by the experience of t he war. Like many German artists of his generation Beckmann enlisted as a volunteer, not out of patr iotism but in search of a life- changing experience, which would ultimately become a form of artistic learning.
Following temporary leave of absence from the army due to a nerv ous breakdown, in 1915 he moved to Frankfurt where he lived until 1933. This was the start of a new life, both in personal terms with the crisis of his first marriage and his second in 1925 to Mathilde von Kaulbach (known as “Quappi”), and in artistic ones.
Beckmann’s reputation c ontinued to grow. “I believe that I love painting as much as I do precise ly because it forces me to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality” the artist wrote in 1918 in a text that sets out his creative principles. Rejection of sentimentality, obje ctivity, concentration on the volumetric aspect of the painting: Be ckmann was the first artist to formulate these basic princip les, using them to establish one of the prevailing trends in the post-wa r aesthetic. Nonetheless, when this aesthetic became a fashionable tend ency with the name of Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], of which he was considered by many to be the principal representative, Beckmann continued to reject being labelled in any way. During the years of the rise of Nazism Beckmann’s positi on became increasingly difficult. He was a prominent pub lic figure in Frankfurt and while his painting revealed its German roots and was only moderately modern, his contacts with the Jewish soci al elite told against him.
He returned to Berlin in 1933 in search of greater anonymity. German museums were, however, ceasing to display his work and hi s income started to decline.
On the day of the inauguration of the Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937 Beckmann caught a train to Amsterdam and never returned to Germany. Following a chronological order, this first part of this exhibition aims to present all the different aspects of Beckmann’s output during the period in question up to his exile.
Among the most important works shown in this section, alongside various sculptures and prints are:
The Street Family Picture , 1920. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Carnival , Double Portrait , 1925. Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf 4 (1914),
Self-portrait with a Glass of Champagne (1919),
Self-portrait as a Clown (1921),
Double Portrait. Carnival (1925),
The Boat (1926),
Carnival in Paris (1930)
and Society, Paris (1931).
Leaving and beginning
“What I want to show in my work is the idea that is hidden behind what we call reality [...] From the starting point of the present I look for the bridge that leads from the visible to the invisible [...]” The most important innovation in Beckmann’s Berlin phase, between 1933 and 1937, was the appearance in his work of a new pictorial format, namely the triptych. Adopted by other German painters during the interwar period, for Beckmann it represented a conscious reference to medieval German art, connecting 20 th -century German painting with its Gothic and Renaissance past. As a type of painting intended for public consumption the triptych would gradually replace the large-format 19 th -century salon painting while with Beckmann it is also associated with the large-format paintings of his youth. These works reflect a radical rethinking not just regarding his creative output but also his relationship with the world and his concept of t he meaning of life and man’s fate. Investigating the visible and the most sensory aspect of the world in order to capture the invisible is characteristic of allegory. The principal effect that exile had on Beckmann’s work was to increase his commitment to this type of painting, princ ipally expressed in the form of triptychs.
The exhibition includes three of the ten that he produced (one of them unfinished), including The Beginning, which he started in Amsterdam in 1946 and completed in the United States in 1949. In it, the artist represented his new beginnings while evoking childhood memories. Masks The first effect of exile is to question the natural identity of the exiled person. Any individual expelled from their home has also been deprived of the ir identity to some extent. The paradigm of this condition is the wandering artist, circus or cabaret performer who appears before the audience in a mask or costume. Another such paradigm is carnival.
Among the principal works in this section are:
Self-portrait with Horn (1938), one of two self-portraits that Beckmann painted in his early months in Amsterdam and among his most memorable works; the triptych Carnival (1943), in which the artist includes himself as Pierrot dressed in white in the central panel; Begin the Beguine (1946), in which the festive atmosphere of the dance is counterbalanced by a setting that suggests a latent menace; and
Masquerade (1948), which reveals the same combination of the
Begin the Beguine , 1946. Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor. Museum Purchase, 1948
The Beginning , 1946 - 1949. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot ( 1876–1967 ), 1967 5
festive and the sinister and in which, as in so many of Beck mann’s works, the couple in fancy dress are the artist and his second wife Quappi. Among these paintings, those dating from the artist’s relatively happy years in the United States re veal how the allegorical knot that connects exile with disguise and with the most sinister side of the crisis of identity continued to be present in Beckmann’s consciousness.
Electric Babylon
The large city is the paradigmatic place of modern man’s loss of identity. In historical terms this sentiment first emerged around the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries but there are ancient precedents.
The Bible recounts the Jews’ exile to Babylon, a place where the divine sense of belonging that constituted their identity as a people was erased as they were subjected to a multitude of false idols. “Electric Babylon”, the title for this section, thus refers to the modern metropolis where the frontiers between the rural a nd the urban, the natural and the artificial and between day and night break down. The result is a labyrinth of bars, gambling halls, dance halls and performance, spaces of temptation and pe dition that present themselves to the biblical Prodigal Son. The city as modern metropolis, “where everyone is a unique event” in Beckmann’s words, became one of the key themes of German sociology at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The transition from the countryside to the city is the quintessence of modernity and the experience of that modernisation, which traumatically culminated in World War I and the destruct ion of hope, would profoundly influence Beckmann’s work. For him, the metropolis presented itself as a performance and among its different forms he was most attracted to the circus and the variety show.
Large Variety Show with Magician and Dancer (1942) is the most spectacular of his interpretations of this theme: here everything is slight-of hand, confusion, fireworks, smoke and the glitter of sequins. Babylon, city of exile, is also ho wever the capital of temptations, the paradigmatic site of the perdition of
The Prodigal Son (1949), another of the artist’s essential works on display in this section and a subject to which he had devoted a series of watercolours in 1918. This section also includes a number of watercolours dating from Beckmann’s final years when he had fulfilled his dream of moving to New York and enjoye d a prolific and highly successful phase.
Plaza (Hotel Lobby) , 1950. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Estate of Max Beckmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany
Plaza (Hotel Vestibule)
and Night in the City , both of 1950 are the direct result of his everyday life in the great metropolis, the greatest “orchestra of humanity on the face of the earth” in the artist’s own words. The long goodbye To leave is to die a little, or a lot. With every le ave-taking something breaks. The exile is a figure of death and vice versa. Furthermore, while Beckmann was an artist who persistently questioned his German identity from the start of his career, in the new Germany that emerged with the rise of National Socialism the parallel between exile and death became a reality.
Having settled in Amsterdam after they left Germany, Max and Quappi lived in the anonymity of exile and with an uncertain future. This was once again the start of a new life. The artist’s first large-scale allegorical composition that he began in Amsterdam is entitled
Birth (1937). A few months later he painted
Death (1938). With a horizontal format and marked compositional and iconographic parallels, they seem to be devised as a pair although Beckmann sold them separately.
Birth and Death are the two great portals of our existence, the obverse and reverse of a single reality and the same image of the exile. We are born itinerant artists, unaware of what life holds for us. We die as travellers, again not knowing how our end will be. What lies between is pure exil and primarily suffering. Life is torment and no one can escape the force of destiny. The pr incipal force that drives us during that long goodbye of life is desire, of which the most explicit manifestation is sexual desire. Together with the above-mentioned Death ,
Vampire (1947-48), Large Still Life with Sculpture and Air Balloon with Windmill (1947) are some of the works to be seen in this secti on.
The sea
The sea is one of the principal motifs in Beckmann’s work , an image of travel and exile, an immense extension in which nothing is still and a medium in which, like rivers, human exist ence flows to its end, is purified and renews itself. Pure fate and pure menace: a seductive glitter for the Argonauts and a doomed blackness for Icarus. Seduction and threat.
Transporting the Sphinxes (1945), one of Beckmann’s most enigmatic works;
Cabins (1948), in which a boat becomes the representation of a city in miniature;
and Falling Man (1950), one of his most surprising paintings, are among the most important works in this section.
The exhibition culminates and concludes with the triptych The Argonauts. Beckmann worked on it for more than a year and a half and considered it completed on 27 December 1950, dying of a heart attack later the same day. He produced the left panel first, which he referred to as “the painter and his model” as an independent work, subsequently completing it with two further canvases and at this point referred to the whole as “the artists”. The left panel thus became an allegory of painting, the right of music and the centre of poetry. However, according to Quappi, having had a dream about the Greek legend, a few days before he finished the painting he started to use the title of The Argonauts and at this point he may have added various classical attributes such as the s word held by the artist’s model and the sandals. The Argonauts completes a cycle begun 45 years before with Young Men by the Sea , which marked the triumphal start of the painter’s career and which also has the sea as its backdrop.
Oil on canvas, 65.1 × 100.9 cm
New York, The Museum of Modern Art
