ART: SCENES OF HELLISH HEAT

He was a bull or a bear of a man, with a slightly shambling gait and a dented cannonball of a head on which a hard derby hat was jammed like a secondary dome. His solidity and doubt come across in Self-Portrait with a Horn, painted in 1938, the second year of his exile from Nazi Germany. Max Beckmann holds a bugle, which he has just blown. His eyes don’t meet yours; he looks away, listening for an answering note. It’s a piercing image of the artist deprived of his context, hoping to connect, uncertain that he can. European man, signaling from a collapsing world.

The show of this and 19 other Beckmann paintings at the downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is–no other word for it–a revelation. Beckmann, who died in 1950, was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but he remains comparatively underknown in Manhattan. Thirty-one years have passed since a New York museum devoted a show to his work. Why this should be, one can only guess. Presumably it has something to do with the belief that purely abstract painting was the climax of modernism, so that a painter whose entire sensibility was bound up with the desire to narrate large themes of love, death, myth and memory through allegories enacted by human figures went against some of the most cherished, indurated dogmas of the American art world.

This seems likely even though Beckmann himself believed that “every form of significant art from Bellini to Henri Rousseau has ultimately been abstract.” But Beckmann was always a contradictor, a towering imagination that made no concessions to the fashions or political pressures of his time. And in the Guggenheim’s show one sees the very peak of his work: seven of the nine triptychs (three-panel paintings, based on the format of church altarpieces) that he painted immediately before and during his exile.

Part of Hitler’s cultural program was the extirpation of what he called degenerate art–essentially, the kind of modernism of which Beckmann, in the early 1930s, was an acknowledged leader. Thus, soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, an entire apparatus of state censorship rolled over on Beckmann. His work was systematically removed from German museums; within five years, 600 of his paintings had been confiscated. After he and his wife fled, he lived and painted in Amsterdam for 10 years, using an old tobacco storeroom for a studio, and then in 1947 went to the U.S., where he died three years later at age 66.

Throughout his exile Beckmann carried monumental ambitions with him, and these were fully realized in his triptychs. They represent one of the greatest efforts of the symbolic imagination in all 20th century art, a sort of theatrum mundi, or world theater, in which the follies and tragedies of Europe, along with its pining for a utopian order on the very brink of its collapse, were given an unrelentingly vivid allegorical form.

Although Beckmann had to bear the burden of politics in full measure, there are no specific political references in his triptychs because as a painter he wasn’t interested in the subject. He wanted his art to go beyond that, relying on what he called “the uninterrupted labor of the eyes” to realize experience in sensation, translating it into form, color and space.

The means toward making such an art came in part, as it must, from a sense of continuity with both past and present. Beckmann’s paintings draw, for instance, on German Gothic woodcarvings, in which the task of scooping space from a thin panel causes the figures to stand stiffly as though in fright. Equally, his work was influenced by Matisse, whose daring, expressive color and use of black translate, in Beckmann, into a stylistic effect similar to stained glass, with burning patches of green or flesh color emphasized by a webwork of heavy black outlines.

But behind the structure of his unique style–forming it, giving it meaning–was the “wonderful chaos” of nature, opposed in its plenitude to the merely superficial attractions of what we would now call media culture. “Take long walks and take them often,” he advised a young painter, “and try your utmost to avoid the stultifying motor car, which robs you of your vision, just as the movies do, or the numerous motley newspapers. Learn the forms of nature by heart so that you can use them like the musical notes in a composition.”

That sense of the specific form undergirds Beckmann’s invented symbols of a world in which ancient prototypes are jammed together with blatantly up-to-date images drawn from city life in the 1930s and ’40s: the masked warriors with spears and cuirasses along with the blond cigarette girls, the sexy shackled women in modern negligees and the awful birds with staring eyes that were one of Beckmann’s prime images of fear and persecution. “Have you never thought,” he wrote to a young woman artist, “that in the hellish heat of intoxication amongst princes, harlots and gangsters, there is the glamour of life?” That heat is everywhere in his paintings. If their forms weren’t so fully and emphatically realized, if the bodies of men and women in his art were less dense and sensuously present, such dreams and visions would not have the same power.

Beckmann’s exile seems prefigured in the first of his triptychs, Departure, 1932-33. Its left and right panels contain scenes of horror, torment and dislocation: a man with amputated hands tied to a pillar, a woman in bondage about to be axed by a headsman, another woman with a lamp (perhaps a muse or a guide) to whom the upside-down corpse of her partner is bound. One cannot decode these too literally, but they presumably represent the chaos overtaking Beckmann’s homeland. The center panel portrays the artist’s dream of escape. The blue horizon (the color of peace) beckons; the king in the boat makes a calm gesture of benediction with his right hand while his left releases a school of small fish from a net trailing in the sea; and a Madonna figure with a child looks on. The painting pulls together a string of images: Christ on the Sea of Galilee, the Fisher King, Beckmann himself. Its relative serenity would not reappear in the triptychs to come.

Some of the narratives embedded in the triptychs are more straightforward than others. Beginning, 1946-49, is perhaps the most explicit of them all, a summing-up of childhood memory. The small boy in the nursery, dressed in a hussar’s uniform and riding furiously on a rocking horse with drawn sword, is plainly Beckmann himself; a Puss-in-Boots hangs upside down from the ceiling; a languid carrot-haired odalisque on the sofa in the foreground blows iridescent soap bubbles of reverie and future desire; and a schoolmasterly figure holds up his hand in a gesture of censoriousness. On the right is a schoolroom scene with a teacher conducting a lesson in geography that doesn’t impress young Beckmann, who holds out a drawing he has surreptitiously made.

The left panel depicts a moment of revelation, the epiphany of a young career. The youth crowned like a king gazes through the thick black mullions of a window into a vision outside, of a blind organ-grinder making celestial music for a choir of angels. It is a version of the dream of unmediated childhood vision in the work of William Blake, “the noble English genius,” as Beckmann called him, “a superterrestrial patriarch.” It also represents the starting point of Beckmann’s lifelong quest as a painter, his quest for the self, “the great veiled mystery of the world.”