[Nettime-ro] For your attention

[bory@xmail.com]

Bory spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

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Note from Bory:

Max Beckmann la tate Modern. Sper ca cineva isho aduce aminte de Beckmann, nu?
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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

The fatalist 
Everywhere he looked Max Beckmann saw horror, violence and madness.  Jonathan Jones on a painter infected by war
Jonathan Jones
Wednesday January 29 2003
The Guardian


Max Beckmann saw the skin stripped off the world. As a medical orderly in the German army in 1915, he had direct access to the most horrific sights of the Great War and saw the wounded and dying up close. His first world war drawings peer into holes. A cadaverous face on a stretcher, a large aperture leading into the skull. A grenade victim with a cheek blown away so that the jaw and teeth are visible. A surgeon going into someone's head. 

Beckmann's war drawings are not so much about the outer horror of war (a photograph can show us that) as the inner violence that makes him draw these things and us look at them. There is something icy about his drawings of wounds; they are not at all emotional. Beckmann is an eye too wide open. After just a few months of this, he cracked up, returning to Germany a nervous wreck. Perhaps that is why he smoked so much. To judge by his self-portraits, he never seems to have stopped smoking. Evidently, he thought it made him look sophisticated.  

The swagger comes off best in his great, sinister Selbstbildnis im Smoking (Self-portrait in Smoking Jacket) of 1927, one of the highlights of the Beckmann exhibition coming to Tate Modern. In this sleazy monolith of a painting, Beckmann comes across as the most camply arrogant German since Erich von Stroheim: the brutal balding head, the black shadow of a suit and that cigarette. Most of all, though, it is the deep shade that swallows his face that is so striking; another hole, a wound, a violent, monstrous patch of furrowed, angry darkness that cuts into his forehead and through his nose, clefts his chin and eats his eye. One eye fixes us boldly out of the personal night that he carries with him.  

>From this self-portrait you might conclude that Beckmann never stopped seeing the terrors of war or brooding over his imaginative complicity. You would be right, but there is something else. Beckmann's experience of the first world war - his frayed nerves, his shaken sense of reality - seems to have opened him to 20th-century history as if, like a character in a horror story, he could see the future.  

"We are on our way to very difficult times," he wrote in a manifesto for his art in 1918. No artist saw what was coming in Germany quite the way Beckmann did. Artists made visceral images of chaos, but George Grosz, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield and even Otto Dix all had convictions that made them see the situation partially: satirically rather than tragically.  

Beckmann had a cynical and objective sense of history. He had always wanted to be a history painter, being a very 19th-century kind of artist, a realist and from a German tradition in which vast scenes of contemporary and past events were considered a major form. In 1912, he painted The Sinking of the Titanic.  

Beckmann's early stabs at portraying history, however, belong to a lost world. What makes his paintings after the first world war some of the most devastating visual documents of the 20th century (better than photographs) is that he seems to have seen, as he did in the military hospital, beneath the skin, inside the skull: he paints not the visible daytime history nor the events in the newspaper, but a night-time history, of dreams and collective fantasies.  

Beckmann's 1927 Self-portrait is an image of himself as a worldly, upper middle class German, part of the society around him, sharing its vices, irrationalities and lies. As early as 1918, he wrote that the place of the artist is in the city, in the crowd. "We must be a part of all the misery which is coming. We have to surrender our heart and our nerves ... It's the only course of action which might give purpose to our superfluous and selfish existence (as artists) that we give people a picture of their fate."  

When he wrote this, he was planning a large, ambitious canvas, a modern history painting that has a whiff of evil about it; his for painting it, ours for looking. Die Nacht (The Night) 1918-19, takes place in a fetid room in a great modern city, maybe a political meeting place, a nightclub or some other rendezvous of the mind's phantoms. It has the splayed horror of a crucifixion, with two martyrs, a man hung by his neck, seated on a table and having his arm twisted by a sturdy bourgeois smoking a pipe, whose bandaged head suggests he was in the war, and a woman seen from behind, in red stockings, bound to a post. Another woman, watching her, is held upside down by a figure closing the blind whose peaked cap might make you think of Lenin.  

We are deep under the skin, in a cave inside the skull. The hypocrisies of daytime have given way to an alternate reality of unhinged and unfettered behaviour. But is this a scene of oppression or delight? The steel cone of a gramophone speaker bulges toward the tied-up woman suggesting there is music playing. There is a woman dressed up behind the hanged man, who is not dead and might even have agreed to this suffering: indeed, the burgher holding his hand looks almost concerned, as if he were monitoring proceedings.  

In fact, the painting iconographically connects itself with images of sex and nocturnal adventure, especially with a scene in William Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, where we see the Rake indulging himself at a house of ill repute in London. Beckmann repeats certain images from Hogarth's painting so explicitly that the reference is impossible to ignore: the candles lying phallically next to the bound woman are like the candle a servant brings into Hogarth's back room for a prostitute to use in an obscene dance; and the stockings and corset are also those of a prostitute sitting in the left foreground of Hogarth's image of urban hell. The spread legs of the woman in Hogarth's picture - and her location in the left foreground - echo the spread legs of the dissolute, satiated, ruined Rake.  

Even without this art-historical reference (although it adds to the savage authority of the painting) it is obvious that nothing is what it seems in The Night. This is a place where pain and pleasure, torture and desire, are impossible to separate: a base and unfathomable scene of devastation.  

Beckmann painted The Night just as a group of French intellectuals were pushing the idea that the unconscious might be a territory of artistic, poetic and political liberation. Yet Beckmann's unconscious has almost nothing in common with that of the surrealists. In Max Ernst's 1923 surrealist painting Pieta, or Revolution by Night, the night is another world of mystery and possibility. Beckmann's The Night is a place where the fragile laws of civility and reason are mocked by our own terrible, arbitrary madness, where there is nothing to be hoped for. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, Beckmann travelled widely, and his intimations of disaster encompassed not only Germany but Europe. There is something incredibly suggestive of the brittle pleasures of inter-war life in paintings such as Acrobats of the Air, in which a figure waving a French flag topples out of a balloon, or his 1927 Big Still Life with Fish, featuring a nasty-looking dogfish. 

These paintings sound prosaic, but they are all atmosphere, created by a thick harshness of line, unsettling, vicious colours and a weird use of space (Beckmann favoured tall canvases, the figures piled or balanced one over another). What always comes across is his horror of irrationality. The idea that unreason was liberating and subversive, which has become the small change of countercultures, was as alien to him as to his contemporary Thomas Mann. In a series of paintings done in Italy in the 1920s, Beckmann depicts seaside life in the Bay of Naples as a sick deluded farce; his images of Italian madness allude directly to Mussolini, just as Thomas Mann allegorically represented Italian fascism's cult of the irrational in his story Mario the Magician.  

Beckmann, like Mann, became a cultural star in Germany. Under the Nazis, 500 works by Beckmann were confiscated from public collections, including from his own room in the National Gallery in Berlin, and some, including the 1927 Self-portrait, were sold abroad. In 1937, two Nazi exhibitions of contemporary art opened in Munich: a show of officially endorsed work and, at the same time, the Entartete Kunst exhibition, a collection of all that was depraved, mad, diseased and worthless in modern art. Beckmann had a number of works in the exhibition of degenerate art.  

Hitler made a speech to open the two shows, and his denunciation of modernism was phrased in language from the depths of night: genocidal language. If these so-called artists really saw things like this, their eyesight needed to be examined, Hitler said, "to see if it is the product of a mechanical failure or of inheritance. In the first case, these unfortunates can only be pitied; in the second case, they would be the object of great interest to the Ministry of Interior of the Reich which would then have to take up the question of whether further inheritance of such gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes cannot at least be checked".  

Beckmann heard the speech on the radio; the next day he left Germany for ever. It is easy for us, looking at The Night and at the alienated, grotesque images of Germany as a seedy circus or joyless carnival that he etched and painted in the 1920s and 1930s, to see his art as uncannily prophetic. This tempts us to be afraid of our own hindsight. But Beckmann really did see deep into the events of his time, showing Germany its own face in a glass.  

Other images, too, by Dix and Grosz, can make you wonder why, if artists could see what was happening, other people claimed not to. But then, everything about that time was disturbingly explicit. The breakdown of the barrier between normality and dreams, the nightmare made real that was Hitler's Germany: all this seems to be there in The Night. It is an image of a society that has agreed to torture itself. 

· Max Beckmann is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from February 12. Details: 020-7887 8008.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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