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- Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Artist's Writings
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Max Beckmann is widely acknowledged as one of Germany's leading twentieth-century artists. A figurative painter throughout his career, Beckmann depicted the world around him with an unparalleled intensity. His art emerges directly from his experiences of the First and Second World Wars, the political upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Nazism, exile in Amsterdam and his final emigration to the United States. By capturing the objects and events that surrounded him, Beckmann hoped to grasp the deeper mysteries underlying human existence. He perceived and painted the world as a vast stage, at once real and magical, upon which his own life and the traumas of contemporary history were closely intertwined. "On My Painting" can give a valuable insight into understanding his work. It was composed in 1938 at a crucial juncture in Beckmann's life, just a year after he was included the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Nazi Germany. It was read by him at the opening of the "Twentieth Century German Art" exhibition. With an introduction by Mayen Beckmann, the artist's granddaughter, and an afterword by Sean Rainbird.
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On My Painting
Max Beckmann
Foreword by Mayen Beckmann Afterword by Sean Rainbird
Tate Publishing
Contents
Preface
Mayen Beckmann
‘Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions – what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows’, wrote Beckmann to Stephan Lackner on 29 January 1938 when Lackner invited him to take part in an exhibition in Paris which, like the London exhibition in the New Burlington Galleries, aimed to show people outside Germany what the politics of Nazi Germany would no longer tolerate.
Political change had robbed Beckmann of his sphere of artistic activity in Germany. In 1937, after the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich with a programmatic speech given by Hitler and which toured Germany thereafter, circumstances became so threatening that Beckmann and his wife fled immediately to Holland. In Amsterdam they soon found a tiny flat with a large tobacco storeroom to use as a studio, where the figures of Beckmann’s imagination henceforth met and thrust themselves onto canvas or paper.
Without any doubt, Beckmann did not believe that this place of passage would, for the next ten years, become his home and refuge and that all attempts to move on to France or America would be hindered at the last minute by the negative stance of those countries, and would then be thwarted by German troops marching into the Netherlands. For Beckmann, who since the 1920s had always stressed that he was a European rather than a German artist and whose artistic antecedents were the great painters of the European tradition, the unheated tobacco storeroom would for ten years become the sole space of freedom.
The text republished here is one of four programmatic speeches that Beckmann, scarcely able to speak English, gave in England and America: it is the first, and the longest and most fundamental. In the middle of his life – he was 54 years old – robbed of the network of dealers, museum directors, critics, collectors and friends, and living in a country where he could not speak the language, he was commissioned to examine the sources of his art using the spoken word. He was called upon to say which formal questions occupied him and how he responded to other stylistic innovations of the time such as Cubism, abstract painting or Surrealism.
Intellectual formulation was not his habit, neither as painter nor as an artist who expressed himself in words. So he wrote a speech, with long dashes to give the spoken rhythm, in which he addressed the full spectrum of his professional concerns, from sober description of life events and work processes, painterly technique and the importance of seeing, right through to his artistic vision. A figure comes into being in his speech, created by the artist, who sings a hymn to the images we see in his own pictures. William Blake appears to Beckmann in a dream and promises solace in the recognition of the beauty of creation in the higher spheres of perception.
In this moment Beckmann appears to decide in favour of sleeping and dreaming, like Kundry at the crossroads between good and evil, black and white, history and transcendence in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. ‘Put the picture away or, preferably, send it back to me, dear Valentin. If people cannot understand it based on their inner engagement with these matters, then there is no point in showing the thing at all.’ This comment, from a letter to his dealer Curt Valentin of 11 February 1938, reveals Beckmann’s attitude to the language of explanation, only half a year before he wrote the text published in the present volume.
It almost seems that it was only when all established possibilities for expression were lost that Beckmann could attempt to convey in words what he would otherwise have painted.
Berlin, January 2003
Beckmann in his studio in Amsterdam 1938 Max Beckmann Archive, Berlin
On My Painting
Max Beckmann
Before I begin to give you an explanation, an explanation which it is nearly impossible to give, I would like to emphasize that I have never been politically active in any way. I have only tried to realize my conception of the world as intensely as possible.
Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul – thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to the real and political life.
I assume, though, that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you to decide which is the more important.
