BECKMANN ET AL. : ANOTHER ONSLAUGHT OF ANGUISHED GERMAN ART

Southern California’s involvement with German Expressionism seems to be an attraction of opposites. The region of the country thought to be the most sybaritic is infatuated with the 20th Century’s most socially critical art.

The latest event to feed local interest in Germany’s wartime expression is “Modern German Masterpieces From the St. Louis Art Museum,” at the San Diego Museum of Art (to March 29). It isn’t a watershed exhibition, like “German Expressionist Sculpture” and the Max Beckmann retrospective that appeared at the County Museum of Art a few years ago, but any show containing 20 Beckmanns that stretch across 40 years and include a major triptych is not to be ignored.

As aficionados of his retrospective may recall, Beckmann fled Nazi Germany in 1937, just as 10 of his paintings were about to be shown in the Nazis’ “degenerate art” exhibition in Munich. He moved to Amsterdam for about a decade and then to the United States, living in New York and St. Louis, where he taught at Washington University in the late ‘40s.

Most of the 45 works shown in San Diego are from a 1983 bequest of about 100 pieces from Morton D. May, former chairman of the May Department Stores Co. and a longtime resident of St. Louis who began to collect Beckmann’s work while the artist was at the university.

The centerpiece of the show, organized by Charles W. Haxthausen of the University of Minnesota, is the 11-foot-wide triptych, “Acrobats,” painted in 1939 in Amsterdam. One of nine triptychs done between 1933 and his death in 1950, “Acrobats” deals with a familiar Beckmann theme--the circus as a theatrical metaphor for life outside the arena.

With its ambiguous array of benign and threatening characters--a cigarette girl, a trapeze artist, ghoulish musicians and Mars, the god of war--this work still has scholars arguing about its meaning. There’s no doubt, however, that “Acrobats” alludes to the high-tension balance required to exist in a world fraught with special interests and power struggles.

The triptych is directly tied to the 1940 painting, “Acrobat on Trapeze,” hanging at the entrance of the exhibition. This intense image of a man (perhaps the artist) flying high above the masses and stilling his audience with a penetrating stare is packed with tension, typifying both the mood of the show and Beckmann’s mature style that merges a Cubist notion of space with a glaring view of flawed humanity.

“German Masterpieces” is fundamentally a Beckmann solo with a chorus of 25 works by 15 other artists. Once “Acrobat on Trapeze” states the theme, it leads into two galleries of works by Beckmann’s contemporaries: emotionally charged portraits, landscapes and genre scenes by the likes of Erich Heckel, Emile Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oskar Kokoschka; Franz Marc’s hymn to nature, sung through the stained glass-like composition of “The Little Mountain Goats,” and Ludwig Meidner’s nightmarish vision of a “Burning City” that seems to explode before collapsing.

Amid these displays of fractured space, slashing line, tortured form and vivid color, two succulent nudes by Lovis Corinth appear oddly naturalistic, but they have a strong emotional quotient in pent-up sexuality. They also provide a link with Beckmann’s 1909-10 portrait of his wife and his 1912-13 interpretation of “The Sinking of the Titanic.”

If Beckmann’s career had ended with these conservative works, he would have been lost among the ranks of able but not very interesting painters of portraits, current events and history. Instead, these early canvases introduce the brooding mentality and sense of catastrophe that intensifies in more sharply focused work that follows.

“Christ and the Woman Taken Into Adultery” (1917) and “The Dream” (1921) confront us with Beckmann as we know him: a young veteran of the First World War whose initial enthusiasm for combat had dissipated into disillusionment and whose art had dropped its veil of restraint. He had begun to chisel form into pinched faces, deep shadows and contorted bodies as he painted allegorical indictments of contemporary society. Loading each canvas with distressed figures and pointed symbols, he might have worked with shards of glass instead of brush and pigment.

A member of neither Die Brucke nor Der Blaue Reiter schools, Beckmann distanced himself from organized groups of German Expressionists and was recognized as the leading painter of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, but the form and content of his mature work tie him securely to the Expressionists. This mentality permeates a selection of portraits, landscapes, a still life and more complex allegorical compositions in an exhibition that can only enrich Southern Californians’ interest in a compelling era of art.