Universum Max Beckmann at Kunstmuseum Den Haag
From January 27 till May 20, 2024, Kunstmuseum Den Haag presents the exhibition Universum Max Beckmann. This exhibition gives an overview of Beckmann’s oeuvre from paintings created in the 1920s in Germany to works made in the end of the 1940s in the United States. As the museum introduction says, “this exhibition presents Max Beckmann’s universe: paintings through which he gave meaning to the chaos of the modern world around him.”¹ Below, I briefly present Breckmann’s biography, describe the exhibition setup, and analyze three paintings of different periods: Carnival (1920), Actors (1941–1942), and Cabins (1948).
Biography
Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884. At the age of 18 he graduated from art school in Weimar, by which time his talent was already recognized and, among others, saluted by Edvard Munch.² In 1904, at the age of 20, Beckmann moved to Berlin and rose to prominence as a traditional painter.
Beckmann’s experiences as a Medical Corps orderly during World War I in Belgium in 1915 profoundly influenced his art. After the war, he settled in Frankfurt in 1917, processing war experiences through his work.
In the 1920s, Beckmann became a significant figure in German modern art. In 1933, however, he was classified as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and was dismissed from his professorship at the Stadel School in Frankfurt. In 1937, Beckmann and his second wife Mathilde, also known as Quappi, fled to Amsterdam a day before the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition was to open in Munich.³
Despite spending a decade in the Netherlands, Beckmann never received recognition there, with only one of his works purchased by a Dutch museum during his lifetime — the double portrait of the artist and his wife acquired by Stedelijk in 1945. Even today, Dutch collections contain only a handful of the artist’s works, which is also evident from this exhibition.
Nevertheless, Beckmann remained extremely productive in his exile. During World War II alone, the artist made more than two hundred works, which he continued selling to German clients thanks to his son’s smuggling of the paintings across the border. And out of nine Beckmann’s triptychs, six were painted in Amsterdam.
In 1947, Max and Mathilde Beckmann relocated to the United States, where the artist gained success and recognition before passing away in 1950 at the age of 66.
Exhibition Setup
The exhibition is primarily organized chronologically, with the artist’s earliest works from Frankfurt showcased in the first room and his latest pieces from New York displayed in the final room. Additionally, each room follows a secondary organization principle, focusing on a specific theme. Some rooms feature paintings from various chronological periods that relate to the chosen theme. Two rooms are entirely dedicated to specific topics, one highlighting paintings of windows and the other featuring works depicting Scheveningen near The Hague.
And here is a tiny interesting detail about this exhibition. It is common for art museums to have short introductory texts in every room. But what I have never seen before is a bullet point summary under those texts. For example, in the central hall presenting Beckmann’s work in exile, one can read the following bullet points:
* Beckmann grows to become one of Germany’s most important painters.
* Is declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis: a death blow for his career.
* Flees to Amsterdam.
* Is highly productive.
* Makes increasing use of heavy, dark contours.
Highlights: Carnival (1920)
In room number two, organized around the topic of experiment, we see the painting Carnival made in 1920 and currently owned by Tate. It is a tall, narrow canvas, fully packed with people and objects. According to the Tate catalogue entry, the woman in the middle is Fridel Battenberg, the wife of Beckmann’s fellow student Ugi Battenberg. With this couple, the artist stayed in Frankfurt in 1915–1919 while recovering from his traumatic experience of World War I. Fridel is dressed as Pierrette, holds a musical instrument in her left hand, and a closed fan in her right. The man to her right is Ber Neumann, Beckmann’s art dealer. He is dressed as Harlequin and holds a slapstick in his right hand. The person lying on the floor and wearing an animal mask is considered to be the artist himself. He also has a slapstick in his hand and holds a horn with his legs.⁴
The figures are located in the corner of a room with a window on one wall and a mirror on the other. Behind the figures, there is a table with a box of cigars, supposedly Havana. Under the table, a bottle of Chablis wine slips out of a bucket. Finally, there is a cat and two candles near the window, a dog under it, and a gramophone near the mirror.
The effect of this painting seems to come from its crammed claustrophobic space and its highly distorted perspective. We see the ceiling, the corner of the room, and its floor positioned pretty much on one surface, the table top is almost vertical rather than horizontal, and the lying figure seems to be under the woman, not in front of her.
There is almost no empty space in the painting, it is all filled with figures and objects. One explanation for this can be found in the brochure for the Max Beckmann exhibition held by MoMA in 2003:
it was in looking out over the no-man’s-land of the battlefield that he experienced a horror vacui that would thereafter compel him to cram his pictures with figures, objects, architectural details, and symbols, all of which served as a barrier against the yawning existential emptiness that haunted him.⁵
This highly distinctive treatment of painterly space became Beckmann’s trademark and can be seen throughout the exhibition.
Highlights: Actors (1941–1942)
During his artistic career, Beckmann created nine triptychs, six of which were made in Amsterdam. One of the triptychs, Actors, is shown in the central hall of the exhibition, mostly dedicated to the artist’s work in exile. The painting was created in 1941–1942 and is currently in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge.
Similarly to other Beckmann’s triptychs, Actors has a complex composition and sophisticated symbolism, the meaning of which is impossible to unravel completely. In the book Max Beckmann’s Triptychs, Charles S. Kessler, a professor of art history, gives a thorough description and iconographic analysis of this work.⁶ Here, I present a brief summary of Kessler’s account.
The triptych’s panels show three different scenes. The protagonists here are an actor playing a suicidal king in the central panel, a Christ-like figure facing a soldier in the left wing, and a fallen woman with a bust of the two-faced god Janus in the right wing.⁷ Each scene, in turn, is divided in two parts: the stage and the pit. In the pit of the central panel, we see three men engaged in a fight, a young woman caressing a cat, and a head of another man absorbed in his thoughts. In the bottom part of the left wing, there is a man reading the New York Times and shackled legs of people, whose bodies are concealed by the stage. The pit of the right wing is occupied by musicians, two well-dressed girls, and a boy waving at us or at the other characters.
Beckmann’s iconography is complex and difficult to interpret, as the artist usually refused to comment on his works. For example, in the central panel, it is not clear what the suicidal king, whose face resembles Beckmann himself, sacrifices his life for. Among multiple interpretations, suggested by Kessler, one states that this is being done “for the sake of fame and immortality.”⁸
The woman in the right wing looks in the mirror either at herself or at the officer who gazes at her from behind the pink curtain. According to Kessler, “one is reminded not only of Manet’s Olympia but of his thematically related Nana, where the courtesan stands before her mirror in a slip while an inconspicuous visitor looks on.”⁹ However, the presence of the Janus-headed bust makes the meaning of this scene ambiguous.
The content of the left wing, on the other hand, is assumed to be based on a real event and, thus, seems to be more certain:
The scene on stage in the left panel of The Actors has been explained by Erhard Göpel as preserving the memory of an incident that Beckmann had witnessed in the house of Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht, the Dutch glass painter. The house provided shelter for Beckmann’s friend, the poet Wolfgang Frommel, and a group of young men who were “bound in friendship to the valiant lady artist.” This circle “read poetry together and interpreted texts of Plato and the mystics.” Because of their convictions or racial origin, these people were mostly without valid papers and were in constant danger of being arrested by the authorities. One time when Beckmann was visiting the house, military police entered to inform the residents that the air-raid warning system had gone out of order. There was a sharp encounter between Frommel and the sergeant of the patrol, and then “the unlikely miracle occurred that the comrades remained unmolested.” The police went away and did not return. The scene in the triptych illustrates the tense moment when the bristling “war menial” was stared down by the poet Frommel. When Göpel asked Beckmann who the long-haired figure might be, presumably before the artist had identified him as Frommel, Beckmann replied: “That could be Christ today.”¹⁰
Finally, the scenes in the pit, according to Kessler, allude to Beckmann’s contemporary reality. Men fighting in the centre, enslaved people on the left, and “brass horn of propaganda” on the right, all seem to refer to Hitler’s Europe. At the same time, the woman with a cat, the man with a newspaper, and the young girls may personify bourgeoisie living their ordinary daily life even in these chaotic times.¹¹
Overall, the triptych captures multiple tense and highly emotional moments. Partly, this tension is conveyed with the painterly toolkit that Beckmann used already in Carnival: shallow overcrowded space with flattened perspective. But as opposed to Carnival, the tension in Actors is also achieved using a dissonant color palette and coarse paint application. In Carnival, figures and objects are carefully rendered and painted in bright colors, with the overall impression being rather calm and harmonious. In Actors, on the other hand, complementary colors filling thick black contours and loose brushstrokes largely contribute to the painting’s emotional and, one can say, aggressive impression. This palette and brushwork also became Beckmann’s trademark, similar to his treatment of space.
Highlights: Cabins (1948)
After relocating to the US in 1947, Beckmann visited Europe a few times to settle his affairs. His last transatlantic trip of 1948 inspired the painting Cabins, currently in the collection of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. The painting is shown in the last room of the exhibition mostly dedicated to Beckmann’s works created in the US.
As the exhibition text observes, in Cabins, Beckmann “reverses a principle of his window paintings.”¹² Instead of looking outside through a window, a spectator looks inside a sequence of ship cabins. From top left to bottom right we see death and mourning, a theatrical scene, a woman combing here hair (perhaps, in expectation of love, according to Peter Selz, an art historian specializing in German Expressionism and a curator at MoMA), another woman lying on a couch (possibly, filled with love), and a woman painter at work.¹³ When looking through these cabin windows, the spectator seems to follow a symbolic journey through love, passion, birth, and grief.¹⁴
And in front of it all is a sailor with a large fish. For Beckmann, fish was an important symbol appearing in many of his works, e.g., Big Catfish (1929), Departure (1933–1935), Journey on the Fish (1934), Fisherwomen (1948) to name a few. Notably, the painting Dream, created as early as 1921, even contains a similar composition of a man with a fish on a board. As is the case with many of Beckmann’s symbols (see, e.g., the above discussion about Actors), the meaning of fish in his works cannot be fully deciphered and accurately described. Without giving concrete interpretations, Selz offers the following direction for understanding this symbol:
“The fish traditionally has been a symbol for Christ as well as of fertility and creativity, and Beckmann’s symbolism, essentially fluid, shifting, open to many interpretations, could easily combine the mystical and the sexual.”¹⁵
In Cabins, similarly to Carnival and Actors, we witness once again Beckmann’s iconic treatment of space: the painting is packed with things and shows almost no perspective. Moreover, there is not one, but two layers of images: the cabins in the background and the ship, sailor, and fish in the foreground. What is more, each cabin contains its own visual story, and so it would seem that the painting should look overcrowded. However, this does not happen. On the contrary, the composition is well-balanced, with the visible parts of the ship framing the cabins on two sides and the diagonal fish gluing together cabin windows of various sizes and shapes. Beckmann’s highly distinctive color palette together with thick black contours also balances and ties together the crowded painting.
My Personal Experience
Before visiting this exhibition, I had never seen a large amount of Beckmann’s works at once. It took me three visits to find my way around the exhibition and to get used to the paintings. Right from the beginning, I was struck by tall, narrow works packed with intertwined objects, like Carnival discussed above. My personal favourites are exactly these paintings, and especially those created in the 1920s before the rise of the Nazis, e.g., New Construction (1928) and Rugby Players (1929). To me, these works convey the joy and force of life. I also enjoy looking at the paintings of windows, presented in a separate room of the exhibition, e.g., Landscape with Vesuvius (1926) and Winter Landscape (1930). As the exhibition text observes, Beckmann paints not only the view from a window, but also the window itself.¹⁶ Notably, Beckmann’s windows are always open, letting in fresh air and connecting the inside with the outside.
See It for Yourself
The exhibition, of course, is not limited to the highlights discussed above and contains many interesting works to appreciate. I hope, however, that through the above analyses I have been able to present important aspects of Beckmann’s painterly and symbolic language. And I also hope that you will use these examples and this knowledge to look at, understand, and enjoy paintings in this exhibition.
¹ Universum Max Beckmann, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 2024, https://www.kunstmuseum.nl/en/exhibitions/universum-max-beckmann.
² Hans Belting, Max Beckmann: Tradition as a Problem in Modern Art, Timken, 1989: p. 12.
³ Belting 1989, p. 13.
⁴ Tate, Carnival by Max Beckmann, Catalogue entry T03294, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beckmann-carnival-t03294.
⁵ Robert Storr, Max Beckmann, The Museum of Modern Art, 2003: pp. 2–3.
⁶ Charles S. Kessler, Max Beckmann’s Triptychs, Harvard University Press, 1970: pp. 50–62
⁷ Charles Chetham, The Actors, Harvard Art Museums, 1955: pp. 62–63
⁸ Kessler 1970, p. 58
⁹ Kessler 1970, p. 58
¹⁰ Kessler 1970, p. 56
¹¹ Kessler 1970, p. 55–56
¹² Universum Max Beckmann 2024.
¹³ Peter Selz, Max Beckmann, The Museum of Modern Art, 1964: p. 94.
¹⁴ Belting 1989, p. 104.
¹⁵ Selz 1964, p. 36.
¹⁶ Universum Max Beckmann 2024.
