The current exhibition of the German painter reminds us of his achievements and his missteps.
“Max Beckmann adopted early on a position against the avant-garde and did not shy away from public controversy when doing so.”[i] So writes the curator of a new exhibition of Max Beckmann at Neue Galerie, New York (closes 15 January). The reference is to a dispute between Beckmann and Franz Marc and Blaue Reiter, supporters of more overt forms Modernism, but Beckmann was willing to reject affiliation with the Neue Sachlichkeit group, whose work his entirely congruent with his. He would ally himself with the (deceased) grand master of Modernism, Paul Cézanne, and austere quasi-prophet Georges Rouault, figures who were venerable and isolated, rather than with artists who were his peers. One cannot help seeing Beckmann’s choices as deliberate and his detachment as strategic.
When considering artists to model oneself upon, the young artist of today may well choose Max Beckmann. He was in many ways exemplary. He was technically skilled (adroitly moving between different mediums, exploiting the potential of each to their fullest); he had an eye for the memorable image; he was a big reader and intellectually curious, willing to absorb new influences and change his position, though not capricious; he worked hard and was greatly ambitious for his art, driven by his outsize ego. After all, he wrote upon contemplating one of his paintings in a museum, “I was deeply moved by myself”.[ii]
He was motivated by the idea of the artist as a moral leader, as outlined by Nietzsche. Beckmann read a lot of Nietzsche in the 1910s. Nietzsche stated that artists would be one class of elite who would dispose of cant and received wisdom and instead chart out a new set of eternal values, disregarding Christian “slave morality”. Here is Beckmann writing in “The Artist in the State”, of 1927:
“The artist in the contemporary sense is the conscious shaper of the transcendent idea. He is at one and the same time the shaper and the vessel. His activity is of vital significance to the state, since it is he who establishes the boundaries of a new culture. Without a universal new transcendent idea the very notion of a new state is incomplete. The concept of a state must first be derived from this transcendent idea, and the contemporary artist is the true creator of a world that did not exist before he gave shape to it. Self-reliance is the new idea that the artist, and with him, humanity, must grasp and shape. Autonomy in the face of eternity. The goal must be the resolution of the mystic riddle of balance, the final deification of man.”[iii]
While this sounds like the sort of thing we would expect to hear a German artist, imbued with an unbending sense of resolve and seared by the experience of warfare (as Beckmann was), he also admired the revolutionary spirit of the Soviet Union, without perhaps knowing much about the specific reality of its artists in 1927. He draws inspiration from the USSR’s godless humanism. After writing that art might replace religion and that workers should too be well attired, Beckmann writes, “We seek a kind of aristocratic Bolshevism. A social equalization, the fundamental principle of which, however, is not the satisfaction of pure materialism, but rather the conscious and organized drive to become God ourselves.” If suitable steps are taken, “in the course of human development we ourselves will become God […] what we want today is to believe in ourselves. To be God, each one of us must share responsibility for the development of the whole. We can no longer depend on anything other than ourselves.” Presumably, Beckmann means the idea of the intercessory deity is moribund and that only individual will to collective action will elevate mankind. Something akin to Nietzschean thought, although Nietzsche thought that true enlightenment would only be provided to exceptional men, not to the masses as a whole.
As we can see, Beckmann’s thinking in 1927 was a mixture of elitism, collective humanism and Socialistic (or group) solidarity. He ends “Bolshevism took the first steps toward the fulfilment of this vision by the state. Yet what Bolshevism lacks is art and a new faith. It lacks centralization – the dogmatic centralization of this faith, as well as a centralization of art in this faith.” I suspect that the German original of “centralization” was closer to “unity” than “centralization”, which would render the artist’s sentiments more clearly. Beckmann seeks spiritual liberation through collective action directed by the state, breaking the idea that liberation comes through the personal connection between man and God, mediated through conscience, education and meditation.
Later, Beckmann would find enlightenment in the writing of Schopenhauer and the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, which would lead him away from his sympathy with the state as arbiter and product of art, an almost Hegelian position. (This is what one aspect makes his later allegories so dense and intriguing.) This deepening and expansion of his thinking is another reason to admire the artist as thinker, but also to take his statements as provisional rather than absolute and proscriptive, as he seems in this 1927 text. After all, following his experience of being denounced by the Nazi party in 1937 as a degenerate artist, and the rise of Socialist Realism in the USSR, Beckmann likely had second thoughts about the wisdom of the masses being implemented through the state, in aesthetic terms if in no other. The criticism of his art in 1937 led him to leave Germany for Amsterdam and later the USA.
Beckmann’s experience of denunciation and exile over the 1930s and 1940s altered his worldview and kerbed his tendency to think in utopian totalising terms. This ability to retract and rethink is a quality that make Beckmann a better man than prophet and makes this inhumanly gifted artist all the more human, admirably so.
Olaf Peters (ed.), Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925, Neue Galerie/Prestel, New York/Munich, 2023, hardback, 302pp, $60/£45
Oliver Kase, Sarah Luisa Henn, Christiane Zeiller (eds.), Max Beckmann: Departure, Hatje Cantz, 2022
[i] Olaf Peters, Olaf Peters (ed.), Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925, Neue Galerie/Prestel, New York/Munich, p. 14
[ii] Beckmann, Departure, quoted p. 59
[iii] Beckmann, The State of the Artist”, 1927, quoted Formative p. 154
