Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950 (review)

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) was one of the most important and written-about artists in the salad days of German modernism; he was widely collected both publicly and privately. Beckmann began as the golden boy of the Berlin Secession; a generation younger than that august organization’s founders, he was poised in the first decade of this century to carry, heroically, large-scale figurative painting forward into the era of expressionism and abstraction. He defended his own particular brand of realism against what he denounced as the excesses of the expressionists, most famously in the essay “Thoughts on Timely and Untimely Art” in 1912 (included in the present volume). During World War I, Beckmann dramatically transformed his style into an hallucinatory carnival realism. He continued to gather a loyal following of well-heeled and well-connected collectors around him, including museum directors. In 1925, the director of the city museum in Mannheim organized an epoch-making exhibition of the newest tendencies in postexpressionist art, which he dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit, or “new objectivity”; Beckmann was far and away the best-represented painter. Critics objected that Beckmann transcended such bland, catch-all groupings, and the director responded by giving him a one-man retrospective in 1928. In 1937, the Nazi regime similarly emphasized his work in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition; the day after the opening, Beckmann left Germany forever. In exile, first in Amsterdam and Paris, then in America, his painting style underwent another dramatic transformation, crowding canvases with religious symbolism and the characters of a very personal and dynamic mythology, the whole unified by thick black outlines and flat colors.

Barbara Copeland Buenger now brings to an English-speaking audience a complete collection of Beckmann’s published writings as well as some diaries and letters. Beckmann’s career has been well documented, and scholars, Buenger not least among them, have cataloged and painstakingly researched his art; the work of identifying sources for his iconography in art history, mythology, and every imaginable gnostic or esoteric tradition is ongoing. His private life, too, is available in published sources, documenting everything from a close chronology of his life to the books in his library, complete with marginalia.

Buenger’s contribution to this body of documentation with Self-Portrait in Words is twofold. First, she has brought together here all of Beckmann’s public writings, from extended programmatic statements such as “The Artist in the State” (1927) and “On My Painting” (1938) to short prefaces from exhibition catalogues and answers to questionnaires published in art journals, to letters written from the front during World War I (which were published as he wrote them). This is far from a complete edition of Beckmann’s writings. As Buenger explains in her preface, Piper Verlag is currently publishing his private correspondence, and his diaries, written between 1940 and 1950, will finally be released to scholars in their unedited state in 2000. What we are given here is therefore the complete public Beckmann, and these public writings, which make up the bulk of the book, are brought together for the first time. Although most of these texts have been republished in various collections, many appear here for the first time since their initial publication. ¹ Second, most of these pieces appear here in English for the first time, rendered in accurate and lively English by Buenger herself and Reinhold Heller, with translations done, wherever possible, from original typescripts.

Thus, this volume is primarily a teaching tool, and one can well imagine its usefulness in the classroom. The texts do not provide a key to the iconography or the narrative meaning of Beckmann’s often puzzling canvases, and few account for working techniques or conditions. Rather, they constitute the sum of his public statements on what it meant to him to make art, and on how he conceived of realism in painting. Beckmann thought hard and with a metaphysical bent on these...