Psychological Realist in a Bad Age

By ROBERT HUGHES

The one sad thing about the Max Beckmann retrospective that began its travels in Munich a year ago is that it will have been seen in only two U.S. cities --first St. Louis, and now (through Feb. 3) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. New York City turned it down flat, apparently because the Museum of Modern Art held a big Beckmann show 20 years ago. But since one of the main facts of contemporary art is the resurgence of figurative expressionism, it seems ridiculous that the East should not see what, despite some trimming, amounts to the definitive exhibition of the man, born a century ago in 1884, who was the greatest German painter of the 20th century.

One thinks of him, with reason, as quintessentially "German." Yet his art had the same relationship (or lack of one) to German expressionism as Edouard Manet's did to French impressionism. Beckmann was not interested in the pseudotranscendental aspects of expressionism--its yearnings for a higher world and bleatings about this lower one, its way of ducking into the "mystical" and the "primitive" as an escape from the politics of immediate experience. To him, as to the Dadaists in Berlin, this was for air heads. "My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art," he noted in one of his copious journals, "which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life." This was in 1909, when the young Leipzig painter was just a month shy of 25. He was not far from such ambitious images of modern catastrophe as The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912. This enormous, early painting, 8 ft. 8 1/2 in. by 10 ft. 10 in., is a "journalistic" homage to Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, but the scores of figures dumbly raging for survival in the cold green water have nothing classical about them. Already one sees some of the main traits of mature Beckmann breaking through: especially the sense of packed humanity in tight spaces that somehow betoken worse things beyond their walls; the tilted, frontal picture plane; the voids that jostle as emphatically as the solids.

Beckmann aimed to be a psychological--if not a literal--realist in a bad age: the Courbet of the cannibals. His work crystallized in the face of two major subjects, the first World War (in which he served the German army as a volunteer medical orderly, until the unremitting chaos and death of trench fighting drove him into mental collapse in 1915) and the city. He was not the first artist to discover how the imminence of death can free the imagination, but he was utterly frank about it. "Since I have been under fire, I live through every shot again and have the wildest visions," he noted, having confessed the secret of how beautiful war can seem in the stops between its terrors: "The circular trembling aperture of the French and Belgian searchlights, like a transcendental airplane . . . the amazing apocalyptic sound of the giant cannon . . . A rider at full gallop in the dark . . . Poor pig that I am, I can only live in dreams." War went beyond art and burned out his fantasies. What it left behind was a hard, copious ash of realism, and an unassuageable will to describe what it was to be not just a German but a European, an inhabitant of the Berlin-Naples-Pari s triangle. "Beckmann has been made ill," he sardonically remarked in 1924, "by his indestructible preference for the defective invention called Life."

Life precipitated in the city, the locus of modernism. His own cities were Leipzig, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and Florence up to the coming of Hitler; Paris and Amsterdam during the war; and refuge, after it, in St. Louis and New York, where he died in 1950. But they tend to merge in his work into a single place. This city was the great human switchboard, the cruncher of experience, where events acquired a formidable urgency and swiftness, where people were forced together and the distances between them grew. It stood for oppression, strain, careful poses and unmediated confessions--above all, for the kind of blurting psychic truth under pressure that no villager could know.

It was also hell. In order to paint it, Beckmann developed a repertory of figures that seem literally imprisoned by the limits of the canvas. The sense of dislocation and implacable graphic firmness this involved, in works like The Dream, 1921, was surpassed by no other artist. The amputee on a ladder with the fish slung round his neck, the war veteran blowing his tin trumpet, the catatonic blond girl--in their mingled density and strangeness, they seem like quotations from some permanent layer of German consciousness. All the more so because Beckmann thought very hard about his own cultural heritage. His figures, with their polelike limbs and mouths like gashes, their awkward eloquence of gesture (long on pathos and aggression, short on grace), step right out of late medieval German sculpture, and so do the claustrophobic spaces they inhabit--shallow, pleated, distorted into shoving and butting against the four edges of the canvas. The "naive" determination of 15th century carvers to get a deep room and a whole Last Supper out of a slab of limewood not much thicker than a plank--with the result that everything stands up and out, as if in fright--got transferred to Beckmann's argument with the flat canvas. Even the gestures are religious. Thus the showing of outstretched palms, Beckmann's favorite sign for pathos and surrender, comes from the traditional figure of Christ as the man of sorrows, displaying his wounds.

Beckmann's imagery veered between the stridently explicit and the threateningly hermetic. Usually both inhabit the same picture. As a symbolist, a connoisseur of enigmatic conjunctions, he was the heir to Gauguin, Ensor and De Chirico. Yet his cast of personages was far wider than the Frenchman's, his range of expression more sweeping than the Belgian's, and his mode of presentation less mannered and neurasthenic, denser in feeling, than the Italian's. But traits of all three get poured and crammed into the same Beckmann--Gauguin's liking for the portentous allegory, Ensor's vision of personality as a raw lurid mask, De Chirico's urban claustrophobia.

Even the most straightforward Beckmanns retain a certain inaccessibility at their core, such as Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927, where the figure of the painter in the black-and-white court dress of the 20th century glares with stony, provoked solidity at the viewer as intruder. Was Beckmann only celebrating the success of his early middle age by putting himself in black tie? Or was he citing, in paint, the sentiment he had already written down a few months before--"The worker should appear in tuxedo . . . This should mean: We want a kind of aristocratic Bolshevism." If paintings as explicit as this present such problems of reading, his more allegorical ones (especially the late triptychs) can be as inscrutable as Hieronymus Bosch. What is one to make of these clowns and fish and blind Oedipuses, caged women and mutilated statues, tarty cigarette girls and Greek headsmen?

There is little question that Beckmann's Temptation, also known as Temptation of St. Anthony, 1936-37, is, in plastic density and dark, hallucinatory power of feeling, one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. Like Picasso jamming a Mithraic bull, newsprint and electricity together in Guernica, Beckmann collapses the new and the archaic on top of each other. The blond she-warrior in the silvery-green cuirass in the left panel (perhaps an image of Athena) is counterbalanced on the right by the invention, more edgily perverse and up to the minute than anything in Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny, of a mean-looking pageboy from the Hotel Kempinski in Berlin briskly delivering a golden crown on a salver while he leads a half-naked woman, bridled and crawling on all fours. The work is more about the problems of the artist than those of the legendary saint; in fact, the "Anthony" is a figure of a painter fettered at his easel, passively adoring his model--who, by this reversal of the usual artist-model relationship, becomes a corpulent dominatrix.

The bare bone of Beckmann's message is that fame, money and the love of women are not all they are said to be, but the strange, staid-looking conviction with which Beckmann invests his personages carries his painting beyond moralizing to something like magical invocation, a raising of the worst noonday ghosts of the '30s. He was certainly one of the great fabulists of modern art. But unlike the surrealists, he was not content with the effort to tap into a collective unconscious through the littered cellar of the individual self. And unlike lesser but more popular artists like Marc Chagall, he did not permit himself a moment's slump into nostalgia. Always on the move, the exile with one packed bag under the bed, gazing at a future that was bound to be worse than the past, he retained an uncanny ability to go through his fears and find history on the other side of them. Beckmann's art was poised, so to speak, between the sleepwalk and the goose step; on its rigorous and masculine frame are nailed the private splendors and public horrors of the first half of the 20th century.