Painting: The Roar of Lions

No nation in this century has tormented itself as much as Germany. One war put it at odds with the world; a second war earned it incomprehensible guilt. German artists, though scorned by the Nazis, learned to turn the other cheek. The cheekiest was the late painter Max Beckmann, who wrote that he wanted to give “our fellow men a picture of their fate, and this can be done only if you love them.” Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill could have supplied the words and music.

Beckmann’s art jangles with the banjo beat and brassy horns of a prewar Berlin nightclub. Despair dresses up in a mauve derby and dirty spats, strutting stiffly around a shallow, klieg-lit stage like a man who has a pocketful of cash and a pawn ticket on his soul. Beckmann painted as if his eyes were taped open; yet his vision of man’s fate is shot through with blinding compassion. So endowed, his art ages little, as shown in his first retrospective currently on view at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, including more than 200 paintings, graphics and drawings.

Wastepaper Figures. “Strange,” wrote Beckmann in his diary in 1947, “that in every city I always hear the lions roar.” He loved the street-scene turmoil and crammed his major canvases with crowds of jostling, uncongenial characters. Son of a Leipzig flour merchant, Beckmann was already a success at the age of 30 when World War I broke out. To avoid killing, he volunteered for the medical corps. Still, the constant exposure to slaughter, which he often drew, punctured his optimism so destructively that 30 years later he wondered if war had wounded his soul.

While Freikorps riflemen rumbled through the streets, the artist crumpled figures up like wastepaper, tumbled them in zigzag planes, froze them in wooden postures that recalled German Gothic altarpieces. No picture better sums up his horror than The Night. Some of his source material came from his drawings in operating rooms in Flanders, but his ghastly torture scene was even more prophetic than he knew. It was to be repeated all over again 14 years later when the Nazis came to power.

Altarpiece Billboards. “There is something that repeats itself in all good art,” Beckmann said, “that is artistic sensuousness, combined with artistic objectivity toward the thing represented.” Beckmann subjected even his nightmares to a harsh, objective light and portrayed them with a concrete reality that drew him acclaim, along with George Grosz and Otto Dix, as a leader of Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity group.

With the rise of the Nazis, Beckmann began painting triptychs, turning his medieval altarpiece form into a public billboard. His first, Departure, peopled by dismembered captives, masked lords and indifferent servants, was done during the first year of Hitler’s rule. It was Beckmann’s Guer nica, his disgust at the terror then brutalizing his own country. By the time he had fled to Amsterdam in 1937, the Nazis had removed 509 of his works, declared decadent, from German museums.

Through a Curtain Darkly. Amsterdam was a refuge to Beckmann for two years, but the Nazis arrived before he could get a visa to the U.S. He virtually hid out while his unwanted countrymen tried to draft him, aged 60 and with a heart condition, into last-ditch service. After his final war, Beckmann was free to emigrate to the U.S., where he taught in St. Louis and New York.

Beckmann finally bought back his soul. Upon receiving an honorary doctorate from St. Louis’ Washington University in 1950, he said: “Indulge in your subconscious, or intoxicate yourself with wine, for all I care, love the dance, love joy and melancholy, and even death. Art, with religion and the sciences, has always supported and liberated man on his path. Art resolves through Form the many paradoxes of life, and sometimes permits us to glimpse behind the dark curtain which hides those spaces unknown and where one day we shall be unified.” Two days after Christmas 1950, while pursuing his imaginary lions on a morning walk in Manhattan’s Central Park, Beckmann, aged 66, suffered a fatal heart attack and passed through to the space he tried to paint.