Max Beckmann: The Still Lifes
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Max Beckmann: The Still Lifes Details
Review "Spellbinding—which is to say I found myself looking at [Beckmann's paintings] longer than most art."—Our Man in Boston"Reveals what a master of the genre [Beckmann] was. . . . It's a splendid collection, which includes a few of the quiet, conventional canvases Beckmann did before World War II, and closes with the explosive, wildly inventive masterpieces done shortly before his death." —Edward Sorel, The New York Times Sunday Book Review Read more About the Author KARIN SCHICK is head of the Modern Art Department at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. HUBERTUS GASSNER is Director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany. Read more
Reviews
This volume is the catalogue that accompanied the eponymous exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from September 2014 until January 2015. Max Beckmann made almost 850 paintings, working in all the familiar modes, including, portrait, landscape, figure painting and still life. Of these, it is his works in the latter genre that have garnered the least attention, as evidenced by the fact that the Kunsthalle, which owns a significant collection of Beckmann paintings, has previously mounted shows of his self-portraits (1993), landscapes (1998), and graphic suites (2006/07), but has only now trained its curatorial light on the still lifes. And even what has been the largest monographic exhibition of his work to date, the great retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern and Museum of Modern Art in 2002-03, largely neglected his still lifes, as one can see from its catalogue: not a single one of the works exhibited in the current show was presented there (see the reviews of “Max Beckmann” on this website). So it is all the more welcome to have this volume of some seventy still lifes in oil and watercolor as a compendium of his work in that genre, based on what is apparently the first extensive exhibition devoted specifically to that area.Beckmann produced still lifes in all phases of his creative career, although there are some periods when that activity was especially intense: in the 1920’s, when his success in Frankfurt was at its highest; in the years following his 1933 banishment by the Nazis; in exile in Amsterdam; and finally in his American residence from 1947 to 1950. The reasons for this occasional increase in activity are discussed in some of the volume’s six scholarly essays. These deal with various aspects of his still-life activity, and they all address in one way or another two of Beckmann’s fundamental positions: one concerning art in general, that “depth in space in a work of art is always decisive” (quoted p. 69), and the other pertaining specifically to his still lifes, that, in contrast to those of the Old Masters, his were not “appetizing images with sausage and ham,” but “music composed of colors and forms” (quoted p. 39). Beckmann was famously concerned with spatial arrangement in his paintings (which he sometimes referred to as “explorations in space”), and in his theoretical writings he frequently emphasized what he termed their “architecture.” As a number of the writers mention, that means that the still life is basic to his art, since it is in that genre—as opposed to landscape or figure painting—that the artist and his imagination can exercise complete compositional control. Some topics of the essays: the exotic objects that Beckmann collected and used as recurring icons (most having some sort of figural element); devices he used to achieve an increasingly complicated narrative structure, such as autobiographical and topical references (newspapers, etc.); his attitude toward contemporary French painting, especially his “campaign” against cubism and Matisse’s modernist devices (greatly modified in later life); and his activities and influence as a teacher (including the late and very strong revival of his interest in the still life as a result of his pedagogical practices). There is also a separate, concise analysis of his 1944 “Still Life with Fish,” a.k.a. “Southern Landscape with frutti di mare.” Although of differing degrees of interest and relevance, the texts are all clearly written and well annotated.The catalogue itself presents the exhibition paintings in full-page reproductions of fine clarity and what seems to be authentic color (I did not see the exhibition but have checked the reproductions against those in other sources). There are six chronological or thematic categories (SL with landscape, SL with figure, etc.), each introduced by a short essay by one of the contributing scholars, but there is no individual commentary. In addition to the exhibition paintings, there are some seventy-five small but also excellently reproduced reference illustrations in the essays, as well as several pages of photographs of the artist. The volume concludes with a five-page biography and a small selected bibliography, but there is no index. I must say that in general I found the critical contributions less challenging or stimulating than they could have been, but that is quite compensated by the excellent presentation of the paintings. Beckmann was a fascinating artist, and the catalogue is quite persuasive in its point that his still lifes, although until now rather neglected by art historiography, were fundamental to his art and are a key to greater understanding and appreciation of his powerful presence and lasting influence. Highly recommended to everyone interested in twentieth-century art, and a necessary acquisition for Beckmann aficionados.
