Comparing notes with Max Beckmann in one of the world’s most splendid art museums
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
(From the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Times)
The St. Louis Art Museum owns 993 works by German-speaking artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nearly half of these are paintings, drawings and prints by Max Beckmann (1884-1950), the Leipzig-born “monster of vitality,” as French critics described him. Some Americans find his tough honesty hard to stomach. Not so our correspondent, a fellow Leipziger, who often spends hours in quiet dialogue with him in the museum’s Beckmann room.
Perhaps it is unseemly for an elderly expatriate from Leipzig to be jealous of a young lady from Detroit. But I am. I envy Lynette Roth for her post-doctoral Mellon fellowship, which begins this June in St. Louis. Her three-year assignment is to produce a publication making Max Beckmann, one of Germany’s most significant expressionists, more accessible to the general public. It’s about time, too. Fifty-eight years have passed since he died of a heart attack on the corner of 61st Street and Central Park West in New York and still no such publication exists of the Beckmann collection in the St. Louis Art Museum, according to Charlotte N. Eyerman, its curator for modern and contemporary art. This collection has no rival anywhere in the world, except for the works still owned by the artist’s descendants in Germany.
I live nearby and often sit on a banquette in the room dedicated to my dead compatriot’s masterpieces, and I keep wondering: Is there really a need for them to be made accessible? What is so obscure about this man who painted, drew and etched in a manner faithful to his dictum, “The greatest mystery of all is reality?” Why was a recent display of his work in New York “not particularly successful,” to quote Sabine Eckmann, the German-born director of Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, another bastion of contemporary art in St. Louis?
Americans are “still skeptical of German expressionist art,” Eckmann explains. But why? Why do they prefer Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso on the one hand to Beckmann and his German contemporaries on the other, whose art the Nazis had banned as decadent? Indeed, why give preference at all to one over the other of these two traditions in modern art that cross-fertilized each other so vigorously a century ago that they should never be separated, a mistake the St. Louis Art Museum has thankfully always avoided?
I turn my head from Beckmann’s disconcerting 1921 masterpiece, “Dream,” with its monstrous depictions of World War I cripples. Looking through the generous opening to the next room I am at once soothed by the sight there of Matisse’s enchanting “Bathers with Turtle” (1908). Eyerman knows how to hang pictures! “Look at all the toys I have to play with,” she said good-humoredly. I envy her, too.
“Americans often find German expressionists too brutal,” said Eckmann. Even the late St. Louis department store tycoon and philanthropist Morton D. May who ended up bequeathing this museum 5,100 works or art – one-fifth of its entire collection – said of German expressionists that they were “sensational but extremely difficult to look at.” It didn’t stop him from becoming the first American to start collecting Beckmann’s works after World War II but he clearly wrestled with the artist’s genius. Why is it then that I can’t take my eyes off his paintings and prints?
The answer must lie in the difference in life experiences. It’s not just that Beckmann and I were born in the same town; I sense kinship between us because we have lived through similar nightmares, albeit a generation apart. “Like all Germans of his generation, Beckmann was deeply affected by the horrors of World War I,” his Frankfurt friend Stephan Lackner once wrote. “It is a matter of record that he was both stimulated and psychologically wounded by the horrors he witnessed while serving as a member of the German army field hospital corps in 1914-15.”
I was not around then but the intense dreadfulness he recorded artistically I experienced three decades later as a child in World War II. In “Dream,” he confronts the viewer with a handless man precariously climbing a ladder and a blind veteran playing a hurdy-gurdy and carrying a sign saying, “Thank God for the light of your eyes.”
Indeed, this picture is brutal but to me, it is also attractive in its truthfulness. That blind man could have been my father who lost his eyesight in combat in 1917. I stared at “Dream” and was jettisoned back to Dec. 4, 1943, when we were bombed out in downtown Leipzig and I, at age 7, had to guide my father to my grandmother’s home. In my mind, I still see the two of us – his left hand gripping my right upper arm – leapfrogging ludicrously over puddles of green flames covering the entire length of the street; they were green because what burned here was phosphor brought to us from the sky.
Incongruously, I asked Eckmann, Eyerman and Francesca Herndon Consagra, curator of prints, drawings and photographs, whether they can discern any form of humor in Beckmann’s grotesque depiction of horror. They rejected this notion out of hand. Given that they are of a different generation, it would be unnatural if they responded otherwise.
Yet grinning grimly, I savor some of these images because I do see humor in them – no gaiety of course but a sardonic outlook that puts to canvas and paper Beckmann’s maxim: “Life is awful, so is art.” I mean sardonic in the original sense of this word – laughter unto death. There were American critics who rejected Beckmann after 1945. One St. Louis pundit even termed his work “outhouse art” because he was no abstract painter and abstraction was en vogue. “I hardly need to abstract things,” Beckmann explained in a 1938 lecture in London. “For each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.”
“It is, of course, the great thing about art that one can appreciate it with one’s own history and prejudices and learn about oneself,” said Consagra as we discussed Beckmann’s worldview, which she sees as “bleak.” She guides me to plate 7 from his “Portfolio of Hell” (1919). It is titled “Night” and describes, reportage-style, one of the many depraved, callous acts of civil violence that racked Germany after the lost war.
It shows marauding soldiers who had broken at night into the attic room of a bourgeois home. One soldier hangs the father of the house on a beam. Another intruder twists the man’s arm. His wife, having apparently been raped, is being tied to a pole while the family’s frightened daughter watches her parents’ torment.
It is strange how differently viewers with different life histories receive such images. Those fortunate enough not to have seen depravity like this probably turn away at first. On the other hand, as a former street Leipzig urchin who “played house” in the smoldering ruins of bombed-out apartment buildings whose rubble might still have covered the mangled bodies of its tenants, I nodded knowingly: Yes, such were our lives, and may you never have to go through anything like this.
It is good, though, that Morton D. May, perceiving still undervalued ingenuity in artwork like this in the late 1940s, bought such gems created by men who, while victims of Nazi prosecution themselves, were nonetheless Germans and therefore not the preferred flavor in New York’s artsy circles. It is still St. Louis’ gain that it brought Beckmann over from his exile in a large tobacco storeroom in Amsterdam and made him artist-in-residence and guest professor at Washington University.
Beckmann loved his two years in this then-lively metropolis, whose vibrancy reminded him much of prewar Frankfurt where, before Hitler’s rise, this giant of a man spent some brief years being the center of adulation by high society. “For a party well ‘composed’ for him, it had to contain one old-fashioned debonair aristocrat, two or three spectacularly beautiful women, some businesslike, energetic bourgeois, a vivacious, swarthy and somewhat mysterious art dealer and several slim, intellectual, adoring youngsters,” as his friend Lackner described those days.
In St. Louis, too, Beckmann “painted masterpieces and plunged into a dazzling world of champagne parties and masked balls,” according to the New York Times. Thrilled to be a celebrity again, the artist marveled, “Oh God, people clapped when Herr Beckmann stood up.” Beckmann liked all that − he was after all someone “who took himself very seriously,” said Eckmann. No other famous artist painted himself as often as this one.
St. Louis still follows the grand tradition of enormously wealthy collectors such as May, the Pulitzer family, Betsy and Earl Millard and Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, who turned this town into a treasure trove of modern and contemporary art, German and otherwise. This is a place with substantial homes filled with incredible and still growing collections, Consagra marvels.
And it is also a place where old and new money supports three spectacular art museums open for free to the public. Consagra says she gets immense satisfaction as she watches classes of kids from the ghettos of East St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi wander starry-eyed through her Study Room for Prints, Drawings and Photographs − it is one of the many wonders of the palatial St. Louis Art Museum guarded by a statue of the sainted French King Louis IX after whom this city is named.
Not much is left of St. Louis’ past German character – except its wealth of German art. At the end of June, an exhibition titled, “The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian and Swiss Drawings from St. Louis collections, 1946-2007,” showing 120 important works of German-speaking artists will open in the St. Louis Art Museum.
And Beckmann? For once the museum’s collection of his paintings and drawings is complete again after it had lent some of its most significant pieces to faraway Beckmann sites, such as Munich and Amsterdam. And it is complete just at the right moment. In the arts, dead geniuses seem to spike once every 20 years, says Eyerman, a descendent of 19th-century immigrants from Leipzig. Right now is such a moment for Beckmann.
While we stand in his room, she keeps eyeing its neighbors gleefully. “Look at this Matisse,” she said pointing in one direction. “Look at this Max Pechstein,” she added repeatedly, pointing in another direction to a warm pre-World War I painting called, “The Big Indian.” Both make us smile because they provide a much-needed relief from Beckmann’s troubling images.
Did I mention that I envied her?
She does know how to hang pictures.
Comments