Max Beckmann: The Path to Myth

Max Beckmann: The Path to Myth by Reinhard Spieler is one of a series of soft-cover monographs on German artists published by Taschen.  Like others in the series, it is profusely illustrated, though the quality of the reproductions leaves much to be desired, and is a mixture of biography and art criticism.  In this case, however, the criticism is so intense that it leaves little room for a more detailed description of the major events in the artist's life.  And not only that, but the reader often feels Spieler is reading too much into the artworks in order to provide each with a mythic dimension that is not necessarily there.  For example, when discussing the 1930 painting The Bath, the author goes to a great deal of trouble to link the work to the ancient Greek tragedy of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.  In his reading, the work is charged with erotic tension and homicidal inclinations.  But the associations are at best obscure.  The painting can just as easily be seen as a depiction of a playful interlude between the artist and his wife Quappi as she prepares to join him in his bath.

Beckmann had a troubled career representative of the sometimes insurmountable difficulties faced by many twentieth century modern German artists, including George Grosz, Otto Dix, Christian Schad and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, to name only a few.  Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884 at a time when the newly unified German state was rapidly becoming the major power in Europe.  His early life was spent in comfortable middle class surroundings and he achieved early success as an academic painter.  He might have continued in this vein indefinitely had it not been for the outbreak of World War I when he was 30 years old.  It's difficult at a distance of one hundred years to appreciate how traumatic the conflict was to those living in once proud Germany, a country that prided itself not only on its military might but on its cultural achievements as well.  Beckmann's military service proved to be the turning point in his life.  While serving in the medical corps at the front lines he, like many others on both sides, suffered a nervous breakdown from which it took years to recover.  Once the war was over, there was no going back to his previous if only because that world no longer existed.  Not surprisingly, Beckmann's wartime experiences had a profound impact on his painting.  As the art historian Ferdinand Schmidt wrote in 1919:

"His [Beckmann's] earlier work seems to have come to an abrupt end.  Those who knew and admired the Beckmann of 1913 may well be appalled by so radical an alteration in style.  There can hardly be any other example in recent German art of such a fundamental change in an artist's approach."

One has only to look at such works as The Night (1919), an oil on canvas, to appreciate the depth of Beckmann's suffering.  There were also changes on a technical level as the artist sought a new medium to better express the horror of his new worldview.  Beckmann produced several portfolios of graphic works in the years immediately following the war's end.  The best and most harrowing of these is a set of ten lithographs collectively entitled Hell (1919), including a monochromatic version of The Night.  It was only gradually, in the relative stability of the Weimar period, that Beckmann was able to reestablish his career and leave behind his nightmarish visions.

Beckmann did indeed include mythic content in his later work.  The most powerful example of this is to be found in his first triptych entitled The Departure (1932), completed shortly before his flight to Amsterdam.  Through the use of mythic content, the artist was able to create new dimensions of meaning in his work, much as James Joyce had done in Ulysses.  But there was another reason Beckmann moved in this direction.  His work had already been castigated by the Nazis, and mythic content that could not be linked directly to any current political situation provided a safe outlet for the expression of his ideas even if they did include veiled references to world affairs.  It did little good.  Beckmann's was condemned as a "cultural Bolshevik" by the Nazis and was forced to give up his teaching position in Frankfurt and eventually fled to Amsterdam where he spent ten years in precarious exile.  Meanwhile, his work was removed from German museums and galleries and was included in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibit held in Munich in 1937.

One facet of Beckmann's career that this monograph explores in detail is his absorption with self-portraits.  In the tradition of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Beckmann ceaselessly painted his own likeness throughout the length of his career.  Better than any text, these portraits show the evolution of the artist from an idealistic youth to an embittered old man crippled by the heart disease that was finally to kill him at age 66 in New York City.

The book is worth reading if only because there are so few works devoted to this major German artist who, due to world events beyond his control, never truly received the recognition he deserved.  Hopefully, there will someday appear a definitive full length biography that will provide him greater prominence in the history of modern art.