A Powerful Vision of ‘Max Beckmann’

The 21 paintings in the exhibition “Max Beckmann in Exile” fill just four modest galleries at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, but the show has the visual and psychological intensity of a blockbuster. The German painter’s work, with its searing colors held together by an exoskeleton of black and its shallow spaces crowded with kings, warriors, acrobats, actors, birds, fish, cages and knives, has a stunning immediacy. It hits hard and leaves a long, lingering compulsion, as Beckmann himself put it, to “think it out.”

Beckmann’s is an intimate grammar, a highly personal vocabulary of symbols and narratives that filter mythical and biblical themes through the devastating experience of two world wars. The first jolted him out of a mildly romantic Realism into an aggressive, rougher-hewn Expressionism. By the time World War II stomped in on storm troopers’ boots, violation--of the body, of accepted rules of conduct, of basic human freedoms--had become an underlying assumption in Beckmann’s world, and he had refined a style that fused sobriety, rage and wonder.

In 1933, Beckmann was forced out of his teaching job in Frankfurt by the swelling fascist tide, and he moved to Berlin. Just after Hitler presided over the opening of the notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937, which included Beckmann’s work, the artist left Germany for Amsterdam. Ten years later, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught--first in St. Louis, then Brooklyn--until his death in 1950 at age 66.

By focusing on Beckmann’s years in exile (but stretching the framework to include several paintings completed in Berlin), the Guggenheim show reinforces Beckmann’s identity as an artist fluent in the phenomenon of displacement. Both his life and his art abound in radical shifts and violent dislocations. In the space of a year (1932-33), he went from public acclaim as one of Germany’s foremost living artists, with a room in Berlin’s Nationalgalerie dedicated solely to his work, to denouncement as a diabolical, corrupting influence on German culture.

Painting after painting vibrates with the friction of divergent forces--freedom and captivity, calm and trauma, play and pain, vulnerability and threat, the mask and the reality behind it--rubbing up against one another in dense, compressed spaces. Even in shading his figures, Beckmann would plunge from peachy skin tones to serious black without the luxury of a smooth transition.

Matthew Drutt, a curator at the Guggenheim who organized the show, doesn’t specifically address issues of exile in his catalog introduction, nor do the other essayists. (Insights on that subject will have to wait until next spring, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounts “Exiles and Emigres: 1933-1945,” an exhibition that will include 11 Beckmann paintings--three of which are in the New York show--among roughly 150 works by artists who fled Nazi-occupied Europe.) Instead, each adds only a thin layer to the substantive body of research into and interpretation of Beckmann’s work.

Beckmann’s paintings are easily--but not exclusively--read as responses to the conditions of his day. The side panels of the iconic triptych “Departure” (1932-33), for instance, show men and women bound and gagged, one with his hands chopped off. In the central panel, a placid sea carries a king, queen, child and helmeted warrior away, as if in refuge from the horrific realms adjacent, where freedom to think, move and create is stifled. “Bird’s Hell” (1938) even shows a cluster of figures giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute. And in “Falling Man” (1950), a man makes the exilic break from a burning building with a calm, suicidal drift downward.

Throughout, Beckmann negotiates a fine balance between the literal and the metaphoric, the timely and the timeless. His recasting of contemporary questions into archetypal narratives argues powerfully for the co-existence of myth, history and present circumstance on the same continuous spectrum. All are part of a continually unfolding process, what he termed the “great and eternally changing terrestrial drama.”

The dynamics within the paintings are complex, especially in the show’s seven triptychs, where discontinuity reigns with straight-faced presumption. A core group of symbols recurs in these late paintings, but in different guises, inviting a multiplicity of readings. Fish, for instance, appear mostly out of water, huge, placid creatures hardly confined to their traditional role as Christian symbols.

“I use it,” Beckmann wrote, “with its vapid stupid look--as a symbol of man’s bewilderment at the mystery of eternity.”

However we “think it out,” Beckmann’s art is an extraordinary experience in itself. And however casual the curatorial construct that brought these paintings together, the show--which, unfortunately, will not travel--is a compact powerhouse of revelations, confrontations and mysteries.

* Guggenheim Museum SoHo, 575 Broadway, New York. (212) 423-3500. Through Jan. 5.