Max Beckmann Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927,
collection of Harvard University Art Museums

Max Beckmann, Night, 1918-19, collection of
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

Agony and Ecstasy:
The Dark Pleasure of Max Beckmann

By Dan Tranberg

Riding up the Plexiglas-encased escalator at the Centre Georges Pompidou — gradually gaining a bird's-eye view of Paris — seems an odd way to begin a comprehensive look at Max Beckmann, an artist known for his subterranean visions of humanity's underbelly.

But once inside this enormous, beautifully-conceived exhibition, such a privileged perspective on the world seems fitting; Beckmann clung to his dead-serious view of the human race like a raven perched high in a leafless tree, supremely confident that he was somehow elected to be above it all. Solemnly gazing down on the mess of life, he depicted himself most often in a black tuxedo with a dour expression on his face and a cigarette dangling elegantly between two fingers.

Max Beckmann: A Painter in History manages to be both an informative historical survey and an emotionally gripping ride though Beckmann's oeuvre. And large as it is — including some 100 paintings, 60 prints, and several sculptures — it's also a perfectly paced display, with ample white space between each piece, many of which are the visual equivalents of punches in the stomach.

Beckmann worked as a nurse in WWI, a little fact that may account for his early fascination with human atrocities. He is said by some to have been an arrogant, unpleasant man who preferred his own company to anyone else's, and often went out in formal attire to sit alone and drink champagne at the bar of an expensive hotel.

His major works span a period of 45 years, 1905 to 1950. Noteworthy is the fact that this is precisely the era in which abstraction was born. Beckmann disapproved strongly with this tidal shift, and declared that abstract art was necessarily decorative and unfinished.

Interestingly, his attitude didn't prevent him from communicating through the abstract elements of form and color. Beckmann spoke fluently with paint in a language that was brutal and direct, but was also wildly exaggerated for dramatic effect; Thomas Eakins he was not. Throughout his career he frequently voiced his desire to capture the realities of life, the "terrible, crude, magnificent, ordinary, grotesque, and banal,'' yet he did so with little concern for illusionistic realism.

At the same time, mythology, religion and various forms of mysticism interested him greatly. And herein lies the strange paradox of Beckmann's work. Nearly every one of his paintings seems to argue both for and against the visceral (and at times, the sensual) as well as the idea that the grit of life can somehow be transcended.

This accounts for much of the simultaneous beauty and horror of his work, filled with contorted figures and sinister faces, as if each character is trying to wriggle out of his or her miserable existence. Still, Beckmann had such a way with paint that it's hard not to ogle over the tactility of his surfaces, the sheer power of his paintings as physical objects.

Major masterpieces such as "Night," from the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf, are among the great pleasures of the show, and a reminder that Beckmann produced a remarkable number of ambitious paintings. Several of these will be familiar to American museum goers, especially the Art Institute of Chicago's 1937 "Self-Portrait in Evening Dress'' and MoMA's triptych "Departure.'' But the bulk of the show is made up of works from European collections, both private and public.

The Paris showing pulls off a rare curatorial feat; it includes a series of films within the exhibition, each occupying a full room. Unlike the traditional didactic version of this kind of supplement to a show, here it is essentially a poetic expression of Beckmann's milieu. Black-and-white footage, recalling both World Wars as well as the cabaret scene of Weimar, successfully infuses the air with a sense of what Beckmann lived through.

Taking it all in, there is a surprising amount of pleasure in Beckmann's work. Mixed in with all of his anxieties about life on earth is a palpable sense of satisfaction in his act of processing it all through painting.

In 1938, in a speech he delivered in London, Beckmann said: "It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game, and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games that make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.''

Max Beckmann: A Painter in History

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 9/10/02 - 1/6/03
Tate Modern, London, 2/13/03 - 5/5/03
MoMA Queens, New York 6/25/03 - 9/30/03

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This article appeared in Angle Magazine, Issue #1, March, 2003

© 2007 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.