ART REVIEW : Stylish Beckmann Graphics at County Museum

When art people make up their short list of the greatest artists of the 20th Century, Max Beckmann is always a contender. But he doesn’t always make the final cut. An exhibition of 50 of his graphic works opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art sets one wondering why not.

He certainly was the undisputed titan of German art in the first half of the century. His famous series of painted triptychs brought the resonance of ancient mythology to bear on the crumbling chaos of a Europe stumbling toward the chasm of World War II. He painted with the ferocious precision of a stonecutter and the series still stands as the greatest moral rumination on the absurd tragedy of the epoch.

Beckmann’s virtuosity allowed him to switch seamlessly from paint to the graphic media, examples here being drawn mainly from LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center and organized by curator Timothy Benson. The artist worked intensively with prints twice--first from 1909 to 1925 as a young man establishing the themes of his mature work. His second foray came in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power, when he was horribly included in the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition, and his years in Amsterdam circa 1941-47 before he emigrated to the States.

Early prints show his grounding in the mythology of the Bible. His images of the Last Supper and of soldiers gambling for Christ’s robe bring them into a timeless low-life world of shacks and shadows as if primitive Christianity still existed in some Frankfurt bierstube . He made the cabarets of the Kurfurstendamm and the carnivals of German villages into the sets for his comedic morality plays. A circus scene like “The Tall Man” uses his claustrophobic sense of space to create the gut feeling of a grotesque world closing in. It’s a small print but it was in the nature of Beckmann’s talent to be able to bring a sense of Felliniesque spectacle into a few square inches of paper.

His characters were charlatans, mountebanks and saints. It was not always easy to tell them apart. An incisive portraitist, he could take a likeness of, say, Reinhardt Piper and layer it stylistically so that Holbein is made to pass through Cubism and come out the other end in the sharp manner of the Neue Sachlichkeit--the surgical “New Objectivity” of the ‘20s. Piper looks like a nuclear physicist. A portrait of Zertelli is unmistakably the image of a wry and shrewd Italian comedian. Beckmann’s knack for expressing character has few rivals in the century.

A relentless self-portraitist, he cast himself in most of the play’s roles but was particularly fond of seeing himself as a prophet in a tux, viewing the world through the smoke from his scepter-held cigarette. On the other hand, there he is as Pontius Pilate.

The most memorable of his graphic self-portraits is a woodcut. Its directness echoes in one of two bronzes on view. Yes, he could sculpt too. The self-portrait is an amazing rendering of his bald pate and bulldog jaw. His head looks like a cannonball. It attests to his general ability to evoke the weightiness of things and thus the biblical sense of the human animal as a more or less seductive bag of walking entrails.

The other bronze is a startling depiction of Adam and Eve. Adam is a giant who cradles an Eve in his hand. She is smaller than an infant. The scale change evokes the royal portraits of ancient Egypt. The depiction of the satanic viper makes a phallic metaphor that is unmistakable. The whole attests to Beckmann’s ability to create striking surreal symbols.

There are disappointments in the exhibition. Two lithographic series--”The Apocalypse” (1943) and “Day and Dream” (1946)--look careless and tossed-off. They remind you of Picasso when he got too cocky and thought the audience would accept anything he signed. Beckmann looks particularly weak when he gets flippant. His forte was engagement and intensity.

That notwithstanding, the show confirms Beckmann’s strengths. He was a brilliant technician and perhaps the most gifted visual dramatist of his generation. He mastered everything he needed of Cubism and Surrealism and grafted it on to the traditional legacy of art’s history. The intelligence and density of his rejuvenation of the past is unrivaled. If his frank grounding in humankind’s intellectual past is anybody’s reason for leaving him off the short list, it’s a bad reason.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to Sept. 1. Closed Mondays. (213) 857-6000.