Max Beckmann

Beckmann & America edited by Jutta Schutt, Städel, Museum Frankfurt am Main, foreword by Max Hollein, texts by David Anfam, Karoline Feulner, Ursula Harter, Lynette Roth, Stefana Sabin, Jutta Schutt, Christiane Zeiller, graphic design by Andreas Platzgummer [hardcover. 280 pp., 261 ills.] The catalogue accompanying the Max Beckmann exhibition at the Städel Museum(Hatje Cantz) Max Beckmann (1884-1950) moved to the United States in the late summer of 1947. He would spend the last three years of his life far away from Europe, years that signified a liberating, intense new start for him. The vastness of the foreign continent, its coasts, the atmosphere of its "wild" landscapes, and its big cities all formed a palpable source of inspiration for Beckmann, who had never before had this type of physical experience of space.

Working with incredible energy and productivity, Beckmann produced numerous major works in these few short years. From today's perspective, Beckmann's independence is all the more impressive when seen in relation to the development of abstract art that was taking place in America at the same time. Beckmann retained his link to representationalism and its metaphorical themes, yet still managed to assert himself as a European painter of international status.

Art to Hear: Beckmann & America, Audio Texts by Ursula Vorwerk, graphic design by Koma Amok [60 pp., 47 color ills.hardcover, with CD] (Art to Hear series: Hajte Cantz) is the official audio guide and companion volume accompanying the Max Beckmann exhibition at the Städe! Museum

Exhibition schedule: Städe' Museum, Frankfurt am Main, October 7, 2011—November 8, 2012

When the Städel Museum acquired Backstage in 1990, one of Max Beckmann's "American"—and one of his last—paintings, it not only represented an important enhancement of the collection. It also served as an occasion to draw attention to the German painter Max Beckmann's position and reception in an international context, an aspect well exemplified by this significant work. At the time, the Städel provided the setting for a dialogue between the painter Beckmann's metaphysical conception of space and the monumental black drawings by American sculptor Richard Serra. The juxtaposition highlighted the comparability of the two oeuvres in the radicality and importance of both artists' handling of the imagination, however different their generations.'

In 2011, with the exhibition Beckmann & America, we would once again like to take up the thread of Beckmann's significance for the following generations. For as we will see, the examination of the late oeuvre of the German in America confronts us with the late forties, a period which was to form an important basis for the coming international developments in art.

Max Beckmann's status as one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century is today undisputed. He lived in Europe until the early autumn of 1947, when, thanks to a teaching appointment, he was able to set out for America for the first time in his life. In the three years that followed he taught in St. Louis and New York, traveled widely, and was extremely productive. The irreplaceable oeuvre catalogue by Erhard and Barbara Göpel informs us that the artist executed eighty-five paintings in the land so far from home. Beckmann himself had kept lists, systematically indexed his paintings in a simple notebook, classified his production according to location, noted the titles, the days on which he had worked on a particular piece, and the names of his works' later owners (figs. 1, 2). Following a ten-year exile in Amsterdam characterized by the isolation, fear, and privations of wartime, life in the New World offered him undreamed-of possibilities for development. It was above all interpersonal encounters and progressive institutions that paved his way. In St. Louis, thanks to such figures as Perry T. Rathbone, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and his wife Euretta (cat. 44, 45), as well as life on the Washington University campus, he found himself in an almost family-like environment. In moving to New York, the artist immersed himself in a pulsating cosmopolitan environment in which the individual moves in the anonymity of the masses. He was at the center of the art world, where he enjoyed access to the cultural-historical treasures of such museums as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and such places as the Cloisters, but also to current developments.

Beckmann found a contrast to the fast pace of the big city in the endless expanses of the American landscape. Long train trips took him through a great diversity of regions, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and along the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Beckmann's health was none too good, and there is something remarkable about the exertions he put himself through—whether on his travels or at home in front of the easel—to experience and accomplish new things. His years in America were undoubtedly a constant tightrope walk between his extremely productive and exhausting hours in the studio on the one hand, and the joys and obligations of his busy social life on the other.

Our exhibition focuses on the artist's late oeuvre, which is the result of a determined artistic stance and persistent work accompanied by an awareness of his own development. Undaunted by the change of continents, in America Beckmann pursued his exploration of figuration and space, line and color, reality and metaphysics. There are conspicuously few landscapes among his motifs, relatively many still lifes, but also portraits as well as religious and mythological subjects. Among the triptychs, The Beginning (cat. 68), a narratively structured recollection of the artist's own childhood, forms the subjective counterpart to the ideationally conceived The Argonauts (cat. 104). Beckmann's "American" oeuvre ultimately proves to be the logical continuation of his previous artistic achievements—without lapsing into repetition. A painting such as Bowery (cat. 86), for example, alludes to his new living environment more with its title—the name of a New York neighborhood and a kind of seal of authenticity—than with its motif. On the other hand, aspects such as a portrait subject's pose that would have been considered rather degage by European standards (cat. 43) randomly appear side by side with those explicitly indebted to European ideas, whether it be the Nibelungen saga (cat. 53), Greek mythology (cat. 104), or a reference to a chamber concert with cello and double bass (cat. 84). Beckmann's depictions of brutality, which had culminated in The Night (1918-19, G 200) and Birds' Hell (1938, G 506), came to a conclusion in 1949 with the painting Perseus' (Hercules') Last Duly (cat. 102). The paintings executed at the very end of his life—Falling Man (cat. 82), The Argonauts (cat. 104), and Backstage (cat. 106)—accordingly possess the quality of wise, odstential statements. It seems reasonable to surmise that none of these works could have come about in Germany, where a severely disconcerted art milieu was struggling to establish itself with a postwar brand of modernism.

At the same time, the artist unquestionably thought of himself as a kind of ambassador, and reported in a letter from America "how greatly this country [Germany] has sunk in the world's estimation, and to what degree this affects me, and will long continue to affect me." But how can we describe the everyday American life that offered Max Beckmann liberties he never would have enjoyed in Europe or in demoralized and war-ravaged Germany in those years?

Any endeavor to imagine the strange new American environment that went along with the art Beckmann produced in those years will find plenty of clues to draw from. The vividly composed memoirs of Walter Barker, Beckmann's St. Louis student with whom he was on cordial terms (cat. 43), the essays by his contemporaries Horst W. Janson and Frederick Zimmermann, a friend who also collected his works, as well as the fundamental observations by Peter Selz, who staged a major retrospective in 1964 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in cooperation with Boston and Chicago, all represent irreplaceable sources for our work.

We are moreover fortunate in having an annotated edition of Beckmann's letters and excerpts from his diaries at our disposal. To anyone who takes them in hand, they offer countless pointers for forming a notion of the atmosphere in which Beckmann lived, as well as of his—the avowed loner's—hopes and fears. His letters supply information and thoughts which can appear in different lights depending on the recipient. His regular diary entries (figs. 8, 134) were written only for himself and certainly never with a view to later publication. They are subjective in nature, contain lots of abbreviations, and are not always decipher-able. They document the weather, the good meals, the bad meals, the book he was reading, the letters he had received, the film he had just seen. And side by side with such seemingly banal information are sudden beautifully written aphorisms and perceptive statements on the diarist's own desires and possibilities. Among the artists' diaries of his generation, there is presumably nothing that compares to Beckmann's. The letters and the diaries—and the artworks and traces of life contained in them—were of equal importance to the preparations for our exhibi-tion and catalogue.

When Beckmann arrived in America he was no longer an unknown entity there. As far back as 1929, the Detroit Institute of Arts had purchased Still Life with Fallen Candles (cat. 2.), becoming the first American museum to acquire one of the artist's works. Within the framework of her fundamental study of Max Beckmann in America, Anabelle Kienle reconstructed the initial phase of the artist's reception in the U.S. It was above all his art dealer J. B. Neumann (1887- 1961) who created the basis for that reception; Neumann had already gone to New York from Berlin in the twenties. In 1927 he organized the first—albeit little noted—Beckmann exhibition in America; in 1931, for example, he sold Beckmann's Family Picture (1920, G 207) to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. Following momentous successes such as the distinc-tion awarded Beckmann at the Carnegie International (1929) and the exhibition German Painting and Sculpture 0931) mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Neumann's friend Alfred H. Barr, Beckmann and Neumann ended their contractual cooperation in 193z. By the time the artist wrote to Neumann from Paris in 1939—"I am very interested pour l'Amerique and will probably meet my end there someday"—he had already found a new business partner: Curt Valentin (1902-1954), likewise an emigrant to America from Berlin. This extraor-dinarily active art dealer opened his gallery in New York in 1937 and presented Beckmann's paintings in it for the first time in 1938. The contact between the two men, resumed after its interruption by the war, was to be of decisive importance for the artist's future.

In the spring of 1947, Curt Valentin wrote a letter to the dean of the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, who had evidently asked his advice about a possible substitute for the American painter Philip Guston (1913- 1908), who taught there. After brief references to two presumable candidates, the Britons Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) and John Piper (1903-1992), Valentin lost no time in making his recommendation: "A man I could probably convince to take your job is Max Beckmann who is very interested in coming to this country. He taught in the art school in Frankfurt, Germany, for many years and is now living in Amsterdam, where he went in 1937. I have discussed this with Perry Rathbone." Less than two weeks later, Beckmann already began preparing for his journey from Amsterdam to America.

The exhibition Beckmann & America features paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. In tribute to the exhibition venue in Frankfurt, but above all as a means of staking out the show's historical framework, both the exhibition and the catalogue begin with the first acquisition for the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, the Descent from the Cross of 1917 (cat. 1). In 1937 this work was labeled "degener-ate" and confiscated; today, like the groundbreaking first triptych Departure (cat. 37), it belongs to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Works such as Begin the Beguine (cat. 36), executed in Amsterdam after the war, anticipate the sense of freedom and departure.

Encounters with people who not only helped the German artist in America but also became his friends are mirrored in a number of selected—and very different—portraits.

Beckmann's conquest of the American landscape can be shown in works in which he assimilated the impressions gathered during his travels. They are seen side by side with the unsettling worlds he developed in his own imagination, such as Early Men—Primeval Landscape (cat. 69).

In the exhibition, the proximity of paintings executed at around the same time inspires the viewer to compare their coloration (cat. 54-56). Others such as the Large Still Life with Pigeons (cat. i05) and Backstage (cat. 106) become temporary companion pieces. And unsurpassed large-scale allegories such as Cabins (cat. 61) and The Town (City Night) (cat. 87) remind us once again of how rigorously the painter defied any one-sided interpretation of his compositions.

In their complexity and degree of formality, Max Beckmann's drawings are to be regarded as artworks in their own right, even when they were executed in conjunction with preparations for paintings. It is thus to be attributed merely to external circumstances when—as in the case of his lengthy stay in Boulder, Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, where he had no studio at his dis-posal—he produced a conspicuous number of large-scale drawings within a certain period. The drawing medium, with its quality of openness in comparison to painting, offered Beckmann a means of absorbing new impressions. In addition, however, it also allowed him to pursue his memories and his fantasy; it sparked his imagination.

Beckmann's outstanding printmaking works of the twenties received attention in America quite early on, thanks above all to the efforts of the publisher and art dealer J. B. Neumann. Nevertheless, after the lithographic series Day and Dream (cat. 6-20), executed for the American market while he was still in Amsterdam, the artist produced only three further small-scale lithographs (cat. 66, 67, fig. 33). A large woodcut after the motif of Voyage was never carried to completion (cat. 97). Following a long interruption, here the artist seems to have wanted to return once again to the oldest known printmaking technique. In a similar manner, Beckmann also resumed his sculptural work after a break of many years, perhaps inspired by Curt Valentin's dedicated efforts on his behalf.

It was not easy for the German painter to define his artistic position in the American art world. No sooner had he arrived in New York than he made straight for the Museum of Modern Art, where his first triptych Departure (cat. 37) was on display. In this institution, which Beckmann described as "absolutely having the say" as far as the politics of the art world were concerned, his painting was exhibited among works representing the dominant concepts in art at the time.

To begin with, there was French painting, works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, and Henri Matisse, which were hugely appreciated by nearly all of the collectors Beckmann encountered. In his endeavor to survive on the art market alongside them, Beckmann placed great hope in his New York dealer Curt Valentin. With the help of the latter, he quite pretentiously claimed, it would be possible to break the established predominance of the French artists in the eyes of the American public. In 1948, he wrote to his first wife, Minna Tube, herself a trained painter: "The modern Frenchmen are still standing like steep walls, but it cannot be denied that Valentin's tenacious work and my perhaps not entirely untalented painting have nevertheless succeeded in making some sig-nificant gashes in this fortress.—But the struggle is damn hard. Big capital and excessively pushed propaganda over many years make these people's stronghold fairly invulnerable and it's already quite something that I am beginning to endure (commercially) alongside them."

On the other hand, by 1947 the young American abstract artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko had also gained entry to the MoMA with their works. Beckmann surely knew what was going on—he himself was a keen observer and his students will also have kept him informed. He would not have been able to overlook the current developments, but his own artistic convictions and the generation gap will have allowed him to ignore them. Thus it is above all the historical proximity that is of interest and significance from the point of view of the present. While the Abstract Expressionists were producing their groundbreaking works, Max Beckmann was also grappling with his painting in America. We can only surmise what he might have been envisioning when he closed his May ii, 1949 diary entry discontentedly with the words: "I'm going to turn exclusively to abstract painting; it's more pleasant."

Beckmann will have known Abstract Expressionism as the American art movement that had liberated itself from its European roots; he did not live to see the lasting impact it was to have on art in Europe. Any reference to the contem-poraneous paintings of the older German artist might initially seem out of place. It increases in significance, however, when we consider the fact that, conversely, Beckmann's painting influenced the younger generations. We are referring here not merely to figurative work of the eighties, but also to his impact on artists such as Philip Guston (fig. 140), for whom Beckmann substituted as a teacher in St. Louis; Ellsworth Kelly, who met Beckmann in Boston in 1948;9 or the artist men-tioned at the beginning of this essay, Richard Serra, who became acquainted with the German artist's painting in St. Louis in 1970. The differences between them may have been substantial, but what these artists shared were their uncompromising artistic ethos and their sense of personal responsibility—qualities that remained untouched by the choice between figuration and abstraction.

However imperturbably Max Beckmann continued on his path, and however pleased he was about an honor awarded him at the Venice Biennale of 1950, the fact that he received no mention whatsoever in volume three of Albert Skira's history of modern painting published in 1950 was a great disappointment to him.'" He responded with the observation that he had "now been disembarked from the 'modern ship' once and for all . . . .—Well, so we'll continue on a raft—.'

Beckmann's American life took place between the studio, the classroom, and the social milieu in which personal and business relationships nearly always went hand in hand. At the time of his sudden death, his Large Still Life with Black Sculpture (1949, G 797) was on exhibit at the MoMA "in solitary splendor,"" while his last self-portrait, Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (fig. 67), was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the show American Painting Today. Along with others here unnamed, neither of these two important works could be obtained for`our show. From the start, the aim of the latter could therefore not be completeness, but rather the presentation of possible present-day perspectives on Beckmann's late work, on the basis of a feasible ensemble.

The exhibition catalogue is an attempt to mirror our treatment of Beckmann's art in the show. It begins with a kaleidoscope of words and images intended to usher the reader into the historical situation, the overwhelming impressions of the New World, life in cities as different as St. Louis and New York, the artist's travels, and his artistic work between the studio and the public. We do not deny the influence of the digital age and its plethora of available imagery on this choice of presentation form. Nevertheless, we have endeavored to supplement the archived photos from Beckmann's life in a well-balanced and versatile manner with ones that do not detract from the open, and accordingly stimulating, character of the volume.

The works are discussed individually and, where expedient, sensibly grouped. Their sequence is thus not strictly chronological, nor is it structured according to artistic media, but takes its cue from the overall composition of the works assembled. Again and again, both similarities and differences prove capable of sharpening our perception. The juxtaposition of Still Life with Cello and Bass Fiddle (cat. 84) with the early Still Life with Saxophones of 1926 (cat. 83) from the Städel's own collection, for example, spans both time and space with rare immediacy.

With the catalogue essays, we pursued the aim of considering "Beckmann & America" from as many different perspectives as possible. Stefana Sabin looks at Max Beckmann's late years through the lenses of a literary scholar as familiar with artists' biographies as she is with the issues of exile. The art historian Lynette Roth, who is in charge of the outstanding collection of Max Beckmann paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum, addresses herself to the theme of the still life, one he liked to assign his pupils but also one which inspired simple as well as complex solutions in his own work. Ursula Harter, a longstanding connoisseur of the artist's oeuvre, examines the important status of "wild" America's cultural history for Beckmann's work, and the fascination it held for him. Finally, David Anfam—author of (among other things) the oeuvre catalogue of the paintings of Mark Rothko and an established authority on the American art of the twentieth century—took it upon himself to seek an answer to a seemingly paradoxical question: 'What is the connection between Max Beckmann and Abstract Expressionism?

The exhibition and catalogue have been charged with the task of dealing with the late work of an artist of high distinction. For the art historian, this means a conscious meshing of the existing Iknowledge of the oeuvre as a whole and the study of its final phase, which can reveal a heightening as well as a weakening`of intensity.

In the case of Beckmann, we have the rare advantage of access to his diary and letters—texts which mirror his attitude toward life and art as laconically as they do dramatically. May the opportunity to look, to read, to contemplate, and then to look again offer every viewer an occasion for exploration, insight, and pleasure.

Max Beckmann The Landscapes edited by Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, Nina Peter, texts by Hans Belting, Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, Eva Demski, Nina Peter, Maren Stotz, Beatrice von Bornnann, graphic design by Schott & Schibig [236 pp., c. 135 ills., 115 in color, 25 x 30.7 cm, hardcover] (Hajte Cantz) Highlights from the master's oeuvre—the landscapes.

Max Beckmann is one of the titans of modern art, although he considered himself the last of the Old Masters. This publication examines the artist's landscape paintings, which are not characterized by layers of allegorical meaning, as are his works in other genres, and their splendid painterly qualities are instantly perceptible. One of the foundations for these landscapes is the potent experience of nature. Personal objects belonging to Beckmann frequently appear in the foreground, like remnants of still lifes, making the viewer aware of the artist's presence. On the other hand, the paintings are realistic reproductions of places he visited, for which Beckmann also made reference to photographs or postcards. A third artistic idea came from art itself: flashes of Beckmann's immense knowledge of art history can be seen in his citations of other works. Thus, his landscapes can be regarded as a kind of summation of his understanding of the world.

Exhibition schedule: Kunstmuseum Basel September 4, 2011–January 22, 2012

When the Städel Museum acquired Backstage in 199o, one of Max Beckmann's "American"—and one of his last—paintings, it not only represented an important enhancement of the collection. It also served as an occasion to draw attention to the German painter Max Beckmann's position and reception in an international context, an aspect well exemplified by this significant work. At the time, the Städel provided the setting for a dialogue between the painter Beckmann's metaphysical conception of space and the monumental black drawings by American sculptor Richard Serra. The juxtaposition highlighted the comparability of the two oeuvres in the radicality and importance of both artists' handling of the imagination, however different their generations.'

Max Beckmann's status as one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century is today undisputed. He lived in Europe until the early autumn of 1947, when, thanks to a teaching appointment, he was able to set out for America for the first time in his life. In the three years that followed he taught in St. Louis and New York, traveled widely, and was extremely productive. The irreplaceable oeuvre catalogue by Erhard and Barbara Göpel informs us that the artist executed eighty-five paintings in the land so far from home. Beckmann himself had kept lists, systematically indexed his paintings in a simple notebook, classified his`produc-tion according to location, noted the titles, the days on which he had worked on a particular piece, and the names of his works' later owners (figs. 1, 2). Following a ten-year exile in Amsterdam characterized by the isolation, fear, and privations of wartime, life in the New World offered him undreamed-of possibilities for development. It was above all interpersonal encounters and progressive institu-tions that paved his way. In St. Louis, thanks to such figures as Perry T. Rathbone, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and his wife Euretta (cat. 44, 45), as well as life on the Washington University campus, he found himself in an almost family-like environment. In moving to New York, the artist immersed himself in a pulsating cosmopolitan environment in which the individual moves in the ano-nymity of the masses. He was at the center of the art world, where he enjoyed access to the cultural-historical treasures of such museums as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and such places as the Cloisters, but also to current developments.

Our exhibition focuses on the artist's late oeuvre, which is the result of a determined artistic stance and persistent work accompanied by an awareness of his own development. Undaunted by the change of continents, in America Beck-mann pursued his exploration of figuration and space, line and color, reality and metaphysics. There are conspicuously few landscapes among his motifs, rela-tively many still lifes, but also portraits as well as religious and mythological subjects. Among the triptychs, The Beginning (cat. 68), a narratively structured recollection of the artist's own childhood, forms the subjective counterpart to the ideationally conceived The Argonauts (cat. 104). Beckmann's "American" oeuvre ultimately proves to be the logical continuation of his previous artistic achieve-ments—without lapsing into repetition. A painting such as Bowery (cat. 86), for example, alludes to his new living environment more with its title—the name of a New York neighborhood and a kind of seal of authenticity—than with its motif. On the other hand, aspects such as a portrait subject's pose that would have been considered rather degage by European standards (cat. 43) randomly appear side by side with those explicitly indebted to European ideas, whether it be the Nibelungen saga (cat. 53), Greek mythology (cat. 104), or a reference to a chamber concert with cello and double bass (cat. 84). Beckmann's depictions of brutality, which had culminated in The Night (1918-19, G zoo) and Birds' Hell (1938, G 506), came to a conclusion in 1949 with the painting Perseus' (Hercules') Last Duly (cat. 102). The paintings executed at the very end of his life—Falling Man (cat. 8z), The Argonauts (cat. 104), and Backstage (cat. 106)—accordingly possess the quality of wise, odstential statements. It seems reasonable to surmise that none of these works could have come about in Germany, where a severely disconcerted art milieu was struggling to establish itself with a postwar brand of modernism.

When Beckmann arrived in America he was no longer an unknown entity there. As far back as 1929, the Detroit Institute of Arts had purchased Still Life with Fallen Candles (cat. 2.), becoming the first American museum to acquire one of the artist's works. Within the framework of her fundamental study of Max Beckmann in America, Anabelle Kienle reconstructed the initial phase of the artist's reception in the U.S.3 It was above all his art dealer J. B. Neumann (1887- 1961) who created the basis for that reception; Neumann had already gone to New York from Berlin in the twenties. In 1927 he organized the first—albeit little noted—Beckmann exhibition in America; in 1931, for example, he sold Beckmann's Family Picture (1920, G 207) to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. Following momentous successes such as the distinction awarded Beckmann at the Carnegie International (1929) and the exhibition German Painting and Sculpture 0931) mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Neumann's friend Alfred H. Barr, Beckmann and Neumann ended their contractual cooperation in 193z. By the time the artist wrote to Neumann from Paris in 1939—"I am very interested pour l'Amerique and will probably meet my end there someday"—he had already found a new business partner: Curt Valentin (1902-1954), likewise an emigrant to America from Berlin. This extraor-dinarily active art dealer opened his gallery in New York in 1937 and presented Beckmann's paintings in it for the first time in 1938. The contact between the two men, resumed after its interruption by the war, was to be of decisive importance for the artist's future.

In the spring of 1947, Curt Valentin wrote a letter to the dean of the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, who had evidently asked his advice about a possible substitute for the American painter Philip Guston (1913- 1908), who taught there. After brief references to two presumable candidates, the Britons Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) and John Piper (1903-1992), Valentin lost no time in making his recommendation: "A man I could probably convince to take your job is Max Beckmann who is very interested in coming to this coun-try. He taught in the art school in Frankfurt, Germany, for many years and is now living in Amsterdam, where he went in 1937. I have discussed this with Perry Rathbone." Less than two weeks later, Beckmann already began preparing for his journey from Amsterdam to America.

Encounters with people who not only helped the German artist in America but also became his friends are mirrored in a number of selected—and very dif-ferent—portraits.

rary companion pieces. And unsurpassed large-scale allegories such as Cabins (cat. 61) and The Town (City Night) (cat. 87) remind us once again of how rigorously the painter defied any one-sided interpretation of his compositions.

In their complexity and degree of formality, Max Beckmann's drawings are to be regarded as artworks in their own right, even when they were executed in conjunction with preparations for paintings. It is thus to be attributed merely to external circumstances when—as in the case of his lengthy stay in Boulder, Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, where he had no studio at his dis-posal—he produced a conspicuous number of large-scale drawings within a cer-tain period. The drawing medium, with its quality of openness in comparison to painting, offered Beckmann a means of absorbing new impressions. In addition, however, it also allowed him to pursue his memories and his fantasy; it sparked his imagination.

Beckmann's outstanding printmaking works of the twenties received attention in America quite early on, thanks above all to the efforts of the publisher and art dealer J. B. Neumann. Nevertheless, after the lithographic series Day and Dream (cat. 6-20), executed for the American market while he was still in Am-sterdam, the artist produced only three further small-scale lithographs (cat. 66, 67, fig. 33). A large woodcut after the motif of Voyage was never carried to comple-tion (cat. 97). Following a long interruption, here the artist seems to have wanted to return once again to the oldest known printmaking technique. In a similar manner, Beckmann also resumed his sculptural work after a break of many years, perhaps inspired by Curt Valentin's dedicated efforts on his behalf.

To begin with, there was French painting, works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, and Henri Matisse, which were hugely appreciated by nearly all of the collectors Beckmann encountered. In his endeavor to survive on the art market alongside them, Beckmann placed great hope in his New York dealer Curt Valentin. With the help of the latter, he quite pretentiously claimed, it would be I possible to break the established predominance of the French artists in the eyes of the American public. In 1948, he wrote to his first wife, Minna Tube, herself a trained painter: "The modern Frenchmen are still standing like steep walls, but it cannot be denied that Valentin's tenacious work and my perhaps not entirely untalented painting have nevertheless succeeded in making some sig-nificant gashes in this fortress.—But the struggle is damn hard. Big capital and excessively pushed propaganda over many years make these people's stronghold fairly invulnerable and it's already quite something that I am beginning to endure (commercially) alongside them."

Beckmann will have known Abstract Expressionism as the American art movement that had liberated itself from its European roots; he did not live to see the lasting impact it was to have on art in Europe. Any reference to the contemporaneous paintings of the older German artist might initially seem out of place. It increases in significance, however, when we consider the fact that, conversely, Beckmann's painting influenced the younger generations. We are referring here not merely to figurative work of the eighties, but also to his impact on artists such as Philip Guston (fig. 140), for whom Beckmann substituted as a teacher in St. Louis; Ellsworth Kelly, who met Beckmann in Boston in 1948;9 or the artist men-tioned at the beginning of this essay, Richard Serra, who became acquainted with the German artist's painting in St. Louis in 1970. The differences between them may have been substantial, but what these artists shared were their uncompromising artistic ethos and their sense of personal responsibility—qualities that remained untouched by the choice between figuration and abstraction.

However imperturbably Max Beckmann continued on his path, and how-ever pleased he was about an honor awarded him at the Venice Biennale of 1950, the fact that he received no mention whatsoever in volume three of Albert Skira's history of modern painting published in 1950 was a great disappointment to him.'" He responded with the observation that he had "now been disembarked from the 'modern ship' once and for all . . . .—Well, so we'll continue on a raft—.'"'

Beckmann's American life took place between the studio, the classroom, and the social milieu in which personal and business relationships nearly always went hand in hand. At the time of his sudden death, his Large Still Life with Black Sculpture (1949, G 797) was on exhibit at the MoMA "in solitary splendor,"" while his last self-portrait, Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (fig. 67), was on view at the Metro-politan Museum of Art in the show American Painting Today. Along with others here unnamed, neither of these two important works could be obtained for our show. From the start, the aim of the latter could therefore not be completeness, but rather the presentation of possible present-day perspectives on Beckmann's late work, on the basis of a feasible ensemble.

The exhibition catalogue is an attempt to mirror our treatment of Beck-mann's art in the show. It begins with a kaleidoscope of words and images intended to usher the reader into the historical situation, the overwhelming impressions of the New World, life in cities as different as St. Louis and New York, the artist's travels, and his artistic work between the studio and the public. We do not deny the influence of the digital age and its plethora of available imagery on this choice of presentation form. Nevertheless, we have endeavored to supplement the ar-chived photos from Beckmann's life in a well-balanced and versatile manner with ones that do not detract from the open, and accordingly stimulating, character of the volume.

The works are discussed individually and, where expedient, sensibly grouped. Their sequence is thus not strictly chronological, nor is it structured according to artistic media, but takes its cue from the overall composition of the works as-sembled. Again and again, both similarities and differences prove capable of sharp-ening our perception. The juxtaposition of Still Life with Cello and Bass Fiddle (cat. 84) with the early Still Life with Saxophones of 1926 (cat. 83) from the Städel's own collection, for example, spans both time and space with rare immediacy.

With the catalogue essays, we pursued the aim of considering "Beckmann & America" from as many different perspectives as possible. Stefana Sabin looks at Max Beckmann's late years through the lenses of a literary scholar as familiar with artists' biographies as she is with the issues of exile. The art historian Lynette Roth, who is in charge of the outstanding collection of Max Beckmann paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum, addresses herself to the theme of the still life, one he liked to assign his pupils but also one which inspired simple as well as complex solutions in his own work. Ursula Harter, a longstanding connoisseur of the art-ist's oeuvre, examines the important status of "wild" America's cultural history for Beckmann's work, and the fascination it held for him. Finally, David Anfam—author of (among other things) the oeuvre catalogue of the paintings of Mark Rothko and an established authority on the American art of the twentieth century—took it upon himself to seek an answer to a seemingly paradoxical question: 'What is the connection between Max Beckmann and Abstract Expressionism?

The exhibition and catalogue have been charged with the task of dealing with the late work of an artist of high distinction. For the art historian, this means a conscious meshing of the existing knowledge of the oeuvre as a whole and the study of its final phase, which can reveal a heightening as well as a weakening of intensity.

In art there is little common ground between biography and landscape. In the normal way of thinking, the two exist in separate worlds. So first of all, we must define what the two terms mean in connection with Max Beckmann and his work. Although biography is not explicit in his oeuvre, the painter often writes of the never-ending search for self pursued within and by means of his art. We could understand this as a biography of the self that is at the same time a quest for self-expression as an artist. This is reflected in his habit of noting where he was living: he signs his works with the place as well as his name (F. for Frankfurt, A. for Amsterdam), as if wishing thus to mark the stations of his artistic life. His eye takes possession of locality in the way writers recreate the places they have lived by describing them. Beckmann's landscapes, too, are in a very specific sense shaped and marked by places he visited or spent vacations, which were ultimately places of brief residence too. He is present in his landscapes, not bodily but all the more with his eye. These are landscapes in the presence of his gaze, just as he saw and remembered them in a particular situation in his life. That might not appear to be anything`special and yet it is when we stumble upon the self-expression in the landscape and even find traces of his actual location—a hotel room for example—by which he records what he saw. In his landscapes Beckmann is also seeking to portray his definition of the nature in which he seeks his inner freedom.

While in exile in Holland in 1942, Beckmann painted Main Station at Frankfurt (G 609) of the building where he visited the restaurant almost daily while living in Frankfurt am Main. The time is, as often, 'about u a.m.', which is why the station square is deserted and the picture dissolves into a memento. Although city and landscape are opposites, and Beckmann was a city-dweller, the stations of his biography wind through both: places of work in the studio and places of freedom in the holidays, imbibing his images. A series of works produced following visits to the spa in Baden-Baden display a veritable obsession to apprehend in art the images he has seen. Spells in the countryside at Villa Kaulbach, his mother-in-law's country house, are also captured in pictures retained by his nevermresting eye. In the landscapes more than anywhere else, we see the emerging restlessness and indeed impatience with which Beckmann measures and tests his art against the motif, whatever it may be. That does not always lead to the desired outcome, but where the landscapes are successful they mean more than just the subject they show. In the landscapes Beckmann chooses to do without the iconographic narrative of the great myths, substituting instead a biographical enactment of the world.

Beckmann's view of the sea, which is my subject in the following, is always marked by his particular situation at the time of painting. Therefore he always sees the same sea differently, although everything at sea recurs. To come straight to the point: the sea marks one of the limits of what is portrayable, and precisely for that reason the depiction is guided back to the self. The searching eye is captivated by the horizon, as it emerges or dissolves in light. The sea forms a stark contrast to the populated world of beaches and hotels, a wide uninhabited otherness that evades the usual categories of time and place, instead opening up a cosmic vista at the frontiers of civilization. The civilization critique that features in Beckmann's texts is another pointer to his fascination for the sea. In his allegorical triptychs the sea is the place of symbolic passage behind the horizon. In a lecture authored for the exhibition Twentieth-Century German Art in 1938 in London, Beckmann writes of " ... an ocean ... always present in my thoughts," and continues: -Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space that I call God."' This comment also explains a letter he wrote in 1939 to his young collector Stephan Lackner: In Cap Martin he -realized completely new things and will need twenty years to put it all into practice... Naturally, that did not mean that the seaside resort itself would interest him for years. What he drew from the Mediterranean, during this period of difficult personal circumstances, was new energy for the artistic quest for 'the real self.' In his diary he notes on September 8, 1940: "Again, all I have done and created is but the discarded skins of my self."' And on December 31: -Only where the feeling for nature and the surface of the canvas meld into one is highest power of suggestion revealed, creating the illusion of space in the flat plane. The metaphysics of the material." The land-scape with sea is the theme of a sphere that Beckmann transposes into his art.

After his early Impressionist phase Beckmann only returned to the theme of the sea in the twenties. The landscapes and city paintings of the intervening years are more or less staged and arranged, filled with props evidencing a barely disguised leaning toward what we would call -Magic Realism." They are hesitant in their manner, compared with the later bravura style, and sometimes compulsive, compared with the later freedom of his vision. In its soft dreamy mood and the enchanted reflection in the water, the Frankfurt Ostpark Landscape with Lake and Poplars of 1924 (G 232, cat. 13) owes much to the "naive" art of the douanier" Henri Rousseau. Rousseau was praised by contemporary art critics as the last artist whose life and work were one. His unfiltered experience of nature, to which the modern artists yearned to return, was rooted in an innocence of seeing that his contemporaries had lost. It was this innocence that allowed him to tackle a material world for which other artists no longer possessed the forms. As Carl Einstein points out, far from avoiding the conflict between perception and motif, Beckmann staged an almost tragic collision between them, banishing the banality of the motif with the arrangement of a dream.' Awareness divides the artist from the existence of the things he portrays. The paintings he produced through to the mid-twenties have an almost defensive character, as if he was using a formula to set himself against the world.

This inhibition still echoes in the seascapes done in Italy and after the beach holiday in Scheveningen. The break-through had however already taken place in 1927, with the oblong-format, The Harbor of Genoa (G 269, cat. 18), in which intuition and idea achieve an almost effortless synthesis. Like the similar-format large still lifes" from the same period, this is a programmatic painting. Beckmann calls up the old genres, including the female nude, to refresh and renew them for the present. And he always enters the picture, but without depicting him-self. Here he paints his nighttime view from the hotel balcony across to the harbor and the city. The hotel guest stands before the open window at night, immersed in observing the brightly moonlit scene, which is frozen to a still life at this time. Except for the trains entering the station far below, their whistles seemingly echoing in the silence. In the night, whose black is also the color of the underpainting, the city almost appears to float on the bright surface of the water. The horizon of the sea retreats away in the distance behind the city. A curtain flutters before the open hotel window. A scarf thrown over the back of a chair reveals the present of a self who views the world from the vantage of a hotel guest. Comparison with contemporary Surrealism can but highlight the distinctness of Beckmann's treatment of light and dark. What we have here is not a hermetic dream scene but an eye rediscovering the world in the night. Everything is visible, but different from daytime. "Hic fuit," the painter could have noted under the picture."I saw this." The biographical is not storytelling from his life but the self-reference in the view.

The following year, 1928, after a beach holiday in Scheveningen, Beckmann completed several paintings pointing up the contrast between here and there, between the confinement of the place where he is and the broadness of the view that he sees. This group of works includes Scheveningen, Five O'Clock in the Morning (G 293, cat. 22), which affirms the biographical reference already in its title. Benno Reifenberg dedicated an essay of literary aspira-tion to this painting. We are looking out of a hotel window as dawn breaks over the still-deserted beach. The exterior, with the empty beach and the pavilion sporting a cigarette advert, is illuminated by early light that reddens the beach and even the curtain at the window. The interior, behind closed panes and where the wineglass from the previous evening still stands, recalls the night. The still life adds to the landscape, identifying the inhabited interior with objects that become emblems of presence. The artist is both here in the room in which he spent the night and at the same time out there in the scene he is looking at. At this hour the breakers have the beach to themselves, rolling up in the timeless rhythm of nature. The horizon crosses the picture not horizontally but following the perspective of the beach, as if the painter is telling us that he is only a viewer of this spectacle.

A still sharper contrast between here and there (and at the same time a contrast between the time of the biography and the tides of nature) appears in the same year in Evening on the Terrace (G 296, cat. 25). Again the time of day is noted with biographical precision in the title. Here Beckmann accentuates the drama of the distant with the terrace forming a counterpoint of closeness. The view from painter's position, which he also imposes on the observer, is cropped below by means of the balcony's balustrade and on the right edge of the painting by a curtain drawn to the side which, as it were, reveals the natural stage. The same train of thought determines the choice of narrow upright format whose compression and constriction provide the greatest imaginable contrast to the spatial depth at the horizon and thematize the asymmetry of place and view. In the distance, behind the curved streetlamps, individual beachgoers appear as small as ants as they cross a patch of water catching the evening light like a mirror. But we are up on the high terrace looking out across the sea where last rays of the setting sun glance under clouds dark as night. The impulsive freedom and audacious brush-work with which the clouds and fading light of the sky are painted gives a foretaste of the sea paintings of the thirties. The world in which the hotel guest lives is foreground to a realm of nature we can look at but not enter. The picture seems like a window that separates the viewer from what he sees. The view has such a presence, but the spectacle of nature remains unreach-able even for the eye.

Two other paintings of sea-side resort of Scheveningen completed the same year are like studies that draw the sea into biographical memory in a very different manner. Beach Promenade in Scheveningen (G 295, cat. 21) captures a stormy day when the bathing huts were closed. Paradoxically, the little painting takes its inspiration from journalistic photography, as were some early paintings from the Berlin period. With high waves and a cold westerly wind driving storm clouds across the sky everything in this beach scene is in motion. The car, driving away parallel to the beach and thus in a sense out of the picture, offers its occupants protection from the elements but the pedestrian on the very edge is less fortunate. Bathing Cabin (Green) (G 297, cat. 23) is the same size but oblong and seems even more like a beach snapshot. The unseen painter has laid down his holiday reading, a book

by Jean Paul, to look out at bathers frolicking in the breakers. Here Beckmann is playing with concealed opposites: outside and inside, with the light on the water and the shade in the hut. In this study a moment comes to a stand-still, transformed into a still life with sea, as if Beckmann wanted to blur every genre distinction and open the window of the still life to enter another picture.

After this prelude the sea-scapes of the thirties are almost unrecognizable. The jolly seaside life in the civilized foreground is blown away and we are transfixed by the cyclical spectacle of nature in which everything episodic falls away. The seascapes now assume a dramatic tone that has stimulated many interpretations concerning Beckmann's circumstances at the time (loss of teaching post in Frankfurt in 1933, emigration in 1937), but above all expresses his determination to free himself from his circumstances through painting and direct his gaze to the distance. Although the broad, vigorous brush-strokes may draw on his Impressionist early phase, any comparison is superfluous in view of the new confidence with which Beckmann shifts the expression from the motif to the visual language itself, from the depicted to the manner of depiction. Benno Reifen-berg rightly names Seashore 1935 (G 419, cat. 42), from the collection of Beckmann's loyal collector Lilly von Schnitzler, one of the "greatest landscapes of the century."' The storm cloud obscuring the pallid sun and the rushing sea breaking on the deserted beach assume a virtually physical presence in the painting. We can almost hear the roar of the wind and the sea. With brutal directness Beckmann here stages the drama of indifferent nature denying itself to the viewer. The claim of Beckmann's art is especially high where one cannot divert into a literary understanding. Mondrian quickly abandoned such landscapes; the Surrealists replaced them with the landscape of the soul. Beckmann was not afraid to attempt the romantic vision, because for him the Romantic crisis was not obsolete.

Two years later, after visiting the island of Wangerooge in 1937, Beckmann painted three seascapes in similar formats that record three phases of a storm as acts in a cosmic drama. The first two were painted in Berlin, the third was finished in Amsterdam after emigration. Each painting has its own composition so they cannot be seen as a triptych, but nonetheless the same storm appears to chase across their shared sky in a time sequence otherwise denied to painting. The theme opens grandly in North Sea Landscape I (Thunderstorm) (G 464, ill. 1), where the storm is approaching over the sea. The sky darkens to a blue-black wall of cloud, which squeezes threateningly in front of the lighter forma-tions and rains itself out over the sea as if sending down rays. From the cloud banks to the breakers, the sequence unfolds in a three-part crescendo extending out of the painted space and over the front of the frame. Storm-whipped waves with foaming spray crash up to the edge of the painting and dissolve all form in wild motion. Here the position of the viewer, which Beckmann previously marks so precisely, is completely washed away.

A single groyne, already largely submerged, offers little respite from the ferocity of the elements.

The view in the next painting is similarly decentered and even depersonalized, but using other means. In Stormy North Sea (Wangerooge) (G 466, ill. 2) we are looking over the beach from a vantage point so high above that it cannot possibly be on a human scale, as if nature itself had taken over the composition. The painting is built around the distance, for there, not here, is where the thunderclouds are gathering over the choppy seas, while here, at the edge of the picture, the sky is still milky-dull.

The thunderstorm -threatens," as we like to say, lending it that pathos of distant warning whose sight and sound set us on edge. The composition of North Sea Landscape II (Passing Clouds] (G 465, ill. 3) is different again, as if we had turned to look in the opposite direction along the coast. But the high vantage point, to create the desired expression of distance and space, remains the same. In the foreground the thunderstorm has already passed. On the horizon the rhythm of the waves drives the sea into a great arc together with the last clouds of the expiring storm. These three paintings form a cycle depicting the wheel of nature manifested in its ceaseless flux of time and light. They concentrate on no particular place or fixed point of view and yet are guided stubbornly, symbolically by Beckmann's eye and imagination. His existential fears may have appeared to be superficial to the painter in the face of the cycle of becoming and passing away in a cosmic space.

In the thirties, as we know, Beckmann also painted other very different sea-scapes where the topo-graphy is allowed to calmly unfold, thereby taking precedence over the bio-graphical gaze. The view`of the Mediterranean near Marseille (G 477, cat. 471, also from 1937, celebrates the beauty of a coastal landscape with a reserved technical expression and calming colors. In 1935 and 1936 Beckmann even paints happy beach scenes with his young wife, but recording the situation spontaneously in watercolors. The only oil painting where he achieves similar levity is the beach seduction scene to which he in 1933 gave the allegorical title The Small Fish (G 373). Surprisingly serving to the French taste for lighthearted "peinture," this was one

of the very few works purchased—still fresh from the studio—by the leading Paris museum.

The span of variation in the genre raises the question whether one must not assign these North Sea paintings to a group of their own, a separate mode among the landscapes. For they share with one another a dark dramaturgy of self-expression where nature is enacted in fortissimo.

This approach continues in subsequent years with Sea with a Large Cloud (G 641, cat. 62) of 1943, in which we experience a further height-ening of the pathos intro-duced in the North Sea paintings five years earlier. The heavy backdrop of clouds obscuring the sun dominates the whole picture and lends the work an almost operatic festiveness. Everything is compressed to a single chord that drowns out the former sequence of spatial layers. Rays of sun coming down in a broad fan appear to emanate from the same fanfaresque cloud whose solo performance also dominates the sea. The painting technique now take even greater precedence over the motif, with the mode of self-expression supplanting the descriptive representation of the motif. On October 29, 1943, Beckmann notes: "Sea landscape with large cloud finished."' He feels besiege in occupied Holland.

One year earlier, in 1942, Beckmann painted Sea Gull! in Storm (G 598, cat. 57), a work that absolutely cries out for a symbolic reading. The monumentality matches Sea with a Large Cloud like another act from the same play. The storm is represented by the wind-tousled mewing seagulls keeping a precarious balance on the narrow railing that protrudes into the foreground. Here it appears they defy, in turns and for a few moments, the forces of nature raging on the abandoned beach. The contrast between the close-up view of the birds and the faraway view of the beach, water, and sky opens up a great spatial rift that Beckmann forces onto the flat canvas. The scurrying clouds are swallowed by the heavy dark sky. Only the pate twilight of the store casts an absent brightness on the beach and the gulls' feathers. The foreign presence of the birds in the storm, threatened and threatening at the same time, condenses into an unmistakable visual impression in which Beckmann, as he always reiterates, seeks an "individualization" of the motif. -I must look for wisdom with my eyes."' as he puts it in his London lecture of 1938.

The liberation of Holland was an enormous relief. In spring 1947 Beckmann painted Promenade des Anglais at Nice (G 741, cat. 68), con-necting back to The Harbor of Genoa (G 269, cat. 18) of twenty years earlier. -First leisurely through Holland (eight years without leaving this ironing board land) ... Abroad from abroad for the first time," Beckmann notes in his diary on March 29.

It is also a reunion with France: "Dream of old times."'" The trip took them to Nice on March 29, where he and his wife remained until April 17. -Evening dog tired ... landed in Hotel Westminster.... Hotel very nice. Enfin ca,"" he writes with a relieved sigh. No sooner than he was back in Amsterdam, Beckmann started painting his memories of the visit. On April 30 he notes: -Worked hard on 'Nice', starting to interest me." The result was an evening painting that, like the early night painting from Genoa, reproduces a view from a hotel balcony.

A female figure in an evening dress, in whose back Beckmann is invisibly present, looks across a bay framed by the lanterns of the elegant promenade. We see the city through her eyes, with a gaze of recognition that Beckmann translates into painted memory. Here again, as so often, he captures the spatiality of the coastal city with almost effortless brilliance in the narrow composition. The dual lighting is the biggest challenge in this painting. The sky above the mountains is still the deep blue of the last evening light. Below, the narrow beams of many lanterns illuminate the city for the night-hawks. Hesitantly, the artificial light of the city begins to hold its own against the rising dark of night. The warm colors blur all divides and strengthen the unity between city and sea, which Beckmann turns into a metaphor for a new feeling of life.

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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

Max Beckmann

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