A True Independent
Sean Rainbird on the German artist Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was arguably the most important German painter in the first half of the twentieth century. His career spanned nearly fifty years. Although his work has affinities with Expressionism and, in the 1920s, with Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), he remains an isolated figure in European art. Beckmann believed in the moral vocation of the artist to depict the spiritual condition of his age. Higher values could be best attained through attention to the visible world and translating this three-dimensional universe into the flat plane of the picture. A full engagement with Modernism happened relatively late in his career, after he had fully established himself as the leading painter of his generation.

Beckmann’s early work is best understood within the context of the various secession movements. The first Secession in Germany broke away from the official Salon in the 1890s. From then on artistic groupings seceded from existing secessionist organisations. Many of these, now perceived as holding back the development of modern art, had originally been progressive offshoots themselves. The newer formations attracted circles of supporters who offered the prospect of sales and critical promotion. In pre war Berlin the Secession, now venerable and less forward-thinking than in its artistic heyday of the 1890s, was dominated by the circle of the older German impressionist painter Max Liebermann and the dealer Paul Cassirer. For a time Beckmann was closely associated with them. The Secession’s main opposition within the broader progressive movement came from the Expressionist artists of the Brücke (Bridge) and the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider).

Beckmann’s adversarial response to the emerging Expressionists of the Blaue Reiter and Brücke, artists in fact of his own generation, became public in an exchange with Franz Marc in 1911-12. Beckmann, prizing above all the spatial relationships within pictures exemplified in the art of Cézanne, dismissed the surface patterns and decorative characteristics rooted in the art of Gauguin and adopted by his Expressionist contemporaries and their French counterparts such as Matisse. Only later, in the late 1920s, did Beckmann recognise the formal and colouristic achievements of Matisse’s works of this earlier period and re-evaluate them in light of his own painting. Beckmann’s traditional style and subject matter of the years up to 1914 – his use of a predominantly earthy palette to depict a range of religious, social and mythological scenes and contemporary disasters -- were supplanted by a radically different approach following his release from military service in 1915. His paintings after the war combine elements of the German Gothic and a Cubist-derived fragmentation. Through this he managed to establish a highly individual modern style.

During the early 1920s Beckmann created a series of celebrated multi-figure paintings, often on exaggeratedly narrow, vertical or horizontal canvases. These melancholy images of a carnival of humanity are dominated by stillness and airlessness. Dimensions beyond the visible are intimated by the presence of instruments connected with the production of sounds and by the mysterious, non-contiguous reflections in mirrors present in many of his pictures. By the late 1920s Beckmann had established himself as the leading German painter of his era, successful at home, holidaying at fashionable Italian resorts, and increasingly eager to establish himself in Paris. Until the late 1930s he visited France regularly, working there for periods lasting several months. He engaged artistically and competitively with those French peers -- Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Leger and Braque -- whom he considered his rivals or equals.

Political changes in Germany led to dismissal from his teaching post in Frankfurt in 1933. He moved from there to Berlin in the early 1930s, seeking greater anonymity in Germany’s largest metropolis. In direct response to the opening of the Entartete Kunst(Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in July 1937 he and his wife moved to Amsterdam, where they remained in exile for the next decade. This period of Beckmann’s career, during which he remained out of the public eye with few opportunities to exhibit and few publications dedicated to him was, however, the most productive of his life. A small circle of other German exiles, and the maintenance of contact with dealers and collectors in Germany, mainly through the actions of his son Peter and other dedicated supporters, mitigated the imposed isolation of exile.

During this increasing separation from the outside world and close confinement in his Amsterdam studio Beckmann evolved a complex, intensely personal, coded, mythological world. He had begun the first of ten triptychs in 1932. The last one was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1950. This visionary realism was offset by a large number of landscapes of southern France and the Dutch coast. These generally smaller pictures appear to have formed something of a release from the sustained effort required to complete the triptychs.

After the war Beckmann had to wait until 1947 before finally getting a visa for America. Financial necessity forced him to take on teaching commitments there but he witnessed a growing interest in his work among American collectors, in particular the department store owner Morton May whose collection bequeathed to St Louis is now among the most extensive holdings of Beckmann’s work in a public collection. Beckmann recorded his pride in seeing his ‘Departure’ triptych enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art to hang beside Picasso and Léger.

Tate Modern’s retrospective of Max Beckmann runs from 12 February to 5 May 2003. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. There are several additional publications, including a reprint of the 1941 translation of Beckmann’s most important speech ‘On My Painting’, which he delivered in London in 1938.

Sean Rainbird has been a curator at the Tate Gallery since 1987. He has been closely involved with the building of the collection and has organised many exhibitions. These include Gerhard Richter, Rebecca Horn Mondrian (with Bridget Riley), Per Kirkeby, Tacita Dean (with Clarrie Wallis) and several Turner Prize exhibitions. He was the inaugural curator (with Frances Morris) of the Tate Gallery’s Art Now programme, which included presentations by Matthew Barney, Marc Quinn, Paul Graham, Tacita Dean and Beat Streuli.