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To accompany the exhibition Max Beckmann, a collaboration between
the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Modern, London, and The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, running from September 2002 and September 2003,
Tate Publishing has produced four publications. Following the logic
of this touring exhibition, two out of the four publications are devoted
solely to the work of Max Beckmann, one of the leading European artists
of the early 20th century. The other two illuminate, through collections
of key polemic texts, creative writing and poetry, the movement of
German Expressionism, with which Beckmann has been partly associated
even though his creative venture owed as much to the Neue Sachlichkeit
and remained always highly individualistic and singular. They focus
on the intense cross-fertilisation between the visual arts and literature
in this ideologically and stylistically heterogeneous movement.
The extensive and well illustrated catalogue Beckmann is
the first comprehensive English language publication on the work
of the artist for almost 20 years — there is a separate catalogue
for the French part of the show edited by its curator Didier Ottinger.
It is motivated by the perceived need to reassess and do justice
to the intensely layered images, metaphorical writings and the complex
personality of the German artist, based on new international research.
The authors, include Sean Rainbird and Robert Storr, Senior Curators
at Tate, London, and MoMA, New York, respectively, and organisers
of the exhibitions there. They draw on documentary material published
over the past decade to reposition Beckmann within the context of
the manifold and diverse creative and intellectual currents of his
time. The collection of thematic essays, organised along a biographical
pathway through the artist’s work, seek to reassess his aesthetic
achievements in view of contemporary cultural concerns. Two related
aspects of Beckmann’s work are highlighted in particular: the
first, an exploration of the potential of traditional painting to
engage with an increasingly complex and uncertain reality through
the means of collage — in terms of disparate pictorial spaces
and formal elements, and multifaceted, ambiguous symbols; the second,
an aesthetic strategy that transforms the ‘passive spectator’
into an ‘engaging participant’. The latter is, as Storr
argues, realised by Beckmann through the ‘dialectical image’,
in which ‘antithetical’ elements are juxtaposed within
a complex, often dense and extremely tense pictorial structure that
— in its ruptured stasis and deliberate polyvalence - hovers
on the verge of implosion. The striking parallels with developments
in the theatre of Brecht and Piscator are briefly pointed out. However,
this fascinating and crucial aspect in its didactic as well as performative
dimension would have certainly merited more attention in the publication.
Formal and semiotic contradictions are often drawn out to the full
in Beckmann’s work. They often reveal the artist’s agony
in the face of extreme individual and collective suffering. The
publication allows us to reconsider Beckmann as a potent ‘father
figure’ for contemporary artists, who seeks to innovate representational
visual art, despite the fact that his direct influence on other
artists of his own time and of later generations, especially outside
of Germany appeared to be relatively small. In Germany, Beckmann
remained an influential point of reference; and it is in this respect
that the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint of the publication becomes dominant.
Storr’s discussion of the ‘Beckmann effect’ looks
to the work of later 20th century artists like Jörg Immendorff
and Philip Guston. However, as one of the stated aims of the publication
(and exhibition) is to re-approach Beckmann, this argument in particular
could have been given a stronger currency by including examples
of more recent generations of artists, for instance the German painters
Neo Rauch and Norbert Bisky, who share with Beckmann the conviction
that figurative art remains a valid and powerful medium of signification.
Their painting displays a strong affinity to Beckmann’s pronounced
strategy to cite and appropriate the symbolism and rhetoric of art
historical precedents that appears at odds with contemporary sensibilities.
Like him, they use such a ‘move’ to articulate, through
those incongruities, their critique with poignancy. They also use
saturated irony about contemporary society, which is marked increasingly
by complexity, conflict, and crisis, a society which in their view
seems ‘out of balance’. However, Leon Golub and Ellsworth
Kelly talk in a short text each about the specific influence Beckmann
exerted on their own visual work.
The layout of the catalogue appears to emulate the non-organic
unity of Beckmann’s pictures. His ‘staged’ collage
of picture planes, motifs and overlays of figures or figure fragments,
is given an odd and unnecessarily disruptive resonance in the way
the main critical essays (marked through their positioning in the
upper two thirds of a page) are injected with a shorter text by
a different author (taking up the lower two thirds of a page), which
focuses on a specific aspect or particular (group of) work. For
instance, in order to follow Didier Ottinger’s wide-ranging
discussion of the artist’s intellectual fermentation process
in Beckmann’s Lucid Somnambulism, one has to leap from
page 144 to page 149 or continue with Golub’s text.
Overall, the range of essays brought together in this catalogue
are purposefully enriched by a number of concise formal analyses
of main (groups of) work, including Hell, a portfolio of
ten transfer lithographs and a cover made in 1919 in response to
the November Revolution of 1918. The substantial illustrations,
in conjunction with the texts, place a strong emphasis on the profound
influence that the ‘New Objectivity’ of the late 1920s
and 1930s asserted on the artist, rather then overstating (as is
usually done) the expressive qualities of his work. The varied contributions
provide a vivid insight into the life and work of the artist, and
stimulate a renewed interest in his work from which vital impulses
for further research may emerge.
On My Painting is a republication of one of the most
important written statements by Max Beckmann. Produced as a speech,
the first Beckmann gave outside of Germany, he explores his relationship
towards the early 20th century European avant-garde, his own aesthetic
vision and professional concerns. This small volume gives the reader
a rare and convenient opportunity to recontextualise and consider
for themselves the citations from this statement made in the scholarly
exhibition catalogue Beckmann. Moreover, Sean Rainbird’s
afterword makes an invaluable and overdue contribution to the history
of the reception of modern, pre-war German art in Britain. He ‘excavates’
the political complexities that marked the organisation and reception
of the much overlooked exhibition Twentieth Century German Art
at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1938, where works
of artists defamed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’ (including
Beckmann) were brought to the attention of a British audience. The
booklet has been thoughtfully produced in Neufville Digital’s
rendition of Futura (2001), a type font originally designed by Paul
Renner in 1928. Renner was a colleague of Beckmann at the Frankfurt
Art School during that period. The typeface has retained much of
its original functional crisp restraint and ‘eye-sweet’
clarity. It visually gives a modernist feel to Beckmann’s text.
Music whilst drowning is an exciting new anthology of
German Expressionist poems, many of them newly translated. The editors
David Miller and Stephen Watts, rather than drawing on existing
compilations, have followed their ‘own concerns and emphases
in the final choice of both text and translation’ (p.117).
This slim volume succeeds in giving a concise yet representative
overview of those highly gestural explorations of urban life and
looming catastrophe. It is richly interspersed with examples of
Expressionist graphic work, thus illuminating the symbiosis of creative
writing and the making of images in the work of individual figures
such as Beckmann, Kandinsky, Barlach, Schwitters or Schiele, and
the fruitful personal and professional relationships between poets
and visual artists overall.
The other anthology, Voices of German Expressionism, has
been republished with some changes to the selection of texts and
artists it contains (to include among others, Wassily Kandinsky)
almost 30 years after it was first edited by Victor H. Miesel. The
re-edited version kept to the threefold purposes that motivated
the original compilation: to provide a ‘conveniently concise
overview’ of key documents of German Expressionism; to sample
the creative writing of major artists, who were either associated
with this disparate ‘movement’; and to encourage future
compilations which might be more ambitious and challenging in scope
towards conventional(ised) perceptions of Expressionism, and in
view of contemporary societal phenomena, attitudes and debates.
However, already Miesel’s concept of Expressionism appears
to be too broad. Notwithstanding the vivid debates among contemporaries
of the early 20th century about the term, concept(s) and movement
that Expressionism was supposed to embody, the editor has included
a number of artists whose style would be more appropriately described
as ‘expressive’ rather then Expressionistic, as in the
case of social realists Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich Vogeler, or
the November Group including Walter Gropius. Although this admittedly
abbreviated selection of artists’ voices reveals much of the
atmosphere of this period of political uncertainty, social upheaval
and existential survival, it seems a pity that, ‘in order to
save space’ (and presumably to include more samples and / or
a broader range of writing) the volume does not contain any illustrations.
The lack of images becomes painfully obvious where works are referred
to directly as, for instance, in the examples of Kirchner’s
writing. The functionalist formula ‘less is more’ applies
here unreservedly.
Taken together, these two anthologies provide a good source material
on German Expressionism for the English speaking reader, suitable
to stimulate a further interest in this very fruitful period of
art in Germany, and to illuminate a specific cultural dimension
and link in Beckmann’s œuvre.
Kerstin Mey
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