"Max Beckmann in New York," is a terrific unexpected show; see it before it closes on February 20 if you can, Tough and angry, packing a wallop yet somehow packing his images with life without ever breaking any bones
Plenty of shows feel like they are cooked up by ambitious curators trying to find an angle, any angle, they can sell to a museum director. Not this one. Give or take a wee bit of padding it feels like the real thing. Beckmann and his wife Quappi found their anchor in New York. They'd been looking for one for a very long time.
He was a successful painter in his early fifties when the Nazis denounced Beckmann a degenerate artist. His work was removed from museums, dealers could not handle him. "Departure," above, his first triptych was started in 1933 and finished two years later. In a way it is like a visual, emotional rehearsal for the journey into exile he and his wife began when they set off for Amsterdam in 1937. He wanted to go to the US then but before that could be organized, war was declared and they were forced to stay in Holland. It was only on November 2, 1949 (after two years teaching art in St. Louis) that they arrived to settle down in New York. "Babylon is a kindergarten by comparison," he said on a brief visit a couple of years before. This was not a criticism. On the contrary. It was just his "kind of thing."
Works managed to get out of Germany. He painted in Holland and St. Louis. Curt Valentin and J.B. Neumann, two German emigre dealers, succeeded in selling his pictures to collectors and museums.
This show is made up of loans from American collections along with works he did after he got to his ultimate home. His time in New York was productive; the works potent. "Carnival Mask," (left) was painted in 1950; the year he also painted the self portrait in a blue jacket (above it)."Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket," was one of the works exhibited in "American Painting Today," which ran at the Met from December 8, 1950 to February 21, 1951. A couple of days after Christmas Max Beckmann set out from his apartment across Central Park to get his first look at it and the show. He dropped dead of a heart attack on the corner of of West 69th and the Park.
Sabine Rewald, curator of this exhibition, writes that it this "poignant" fact that inspired her to produce this show. The exhibition is proof that this is so. It is often moving as well as beautiful.
