A World of Anarchy: Max Beckmann at MoMA

Filled with music, art, and drama, Max Beckmann's world is perfect, you would think, for the Juilliard community. It is, however, mightily disturbing art; strident music and ugly dramas play out in his canvases and works on paper. Actors perform freaky stunts; horn players, percussionists, lutenists, and cellists play instruments missing parts, or play them upside down. It is still perfect for us—but more challenging, unsettling, and questioning than pleasing and inspiring.

Departure, 1932-33. Oil on canvas. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Never heard of Beckmann? Well, that's not surprising. You see, Max Beckmann (1884-1950)—the subject of a masterful exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art through September 29—doesn't really fit into any of the "isms" of 20th-century art. He is not quite a German Expressionist, certainly not a Surrealist, not a Cubist, neither realist nor abstract. Although the work clearly has heavy symbolic and metaphorical content, it is not easy to decipher. Potent with anger and disgust at humankind's lack of humanity, the work often explodes without being overtly political.

The artist's subtexts include nightmarish recollections of World War I, premonitions of World War II, Hitler and Nazism, and the unimaginable cruelty ensuing from war and hatred. History often omits artists like Beckmann, who cannot be categorized; for this reason, the current show of his work at the Museum of Modern Art is of utmost importance. The first comprehensive Beckmann exhibition in New York since 1964, it is comprised of 133 works, including paintings, drawing, prints, and sculpture. Unlike the 1997 show at the Guggenheim SoHo (only 21 paintings), which dealt solely with the artist's years in exile, this includes works in all media, from all periods of his life. It is also spacious and easy to see. What could have been a disorienting crush of too many cacophonies screaming at once is actually quite well organized, and fits nicely into the large warehouse that temporarily houses MoMA in Queens.

Today, critics on the whole praise Beckmann's work, as do artists, but he has never quite "made it" in the popular eye. Let's face it: his work is not likeable, nor did he mean it to be. Most of his paintings and graphics evoke a world of disharmony, a reflection of his times (and those times included both world wars, with all the torture and mass murder perpetrated in the name of human beings). In fact, the artist has been called variously a German Goya or Bosch, because of the ways in which he portrays these evils.

Family Picture, 1920. Oil on canvas. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

When you enter the exhibition, you see five black-and-white self-portraits, a preview of more to come, showing the introspective artist at different ages, wearing an assortment of outfits. Then, in the first room, there are a number of early paintings: a death-room scene and a street scene, reminiscent of the great Norwegian painter, Munch; a Nordic-looking double portrait; some young boys by the sea, looking like Renaissance paintings or Degas' early work, influenced by the Renaissance. A large tableau of the sinking of the Titanic is our first glimpse of the anarchy the artist will later portray, but he has not yet come into his own.

The works in the next room, dating from 1914 to 1920, thrust us abruptly into Beckmann's world. The artist volunteered to help out on the war front in 1914, but lasted there only one year. At first, war subjects provided grist for his mill, and he was ideologically in favor of it, but the sheer amount of suffering, carnage, and loneliness contributed to his nervous breakdown less than a year later. A number of anguished death and struggle scenes of World War I culminate in the aptly titled Nightmare (1918-19). This is the first of many large, complex paintings, employing both a unique formal composition of space somewhere between deep and shallow, and private symbolic content. The jerky, agonized movements of the tortured couple contrast with those of their nonchalantly vicious torturers. The figures are at once specific and universal, real and metaphorical. Several unforgettable riffs on Christian themes from the same period include a Descent From the Cross and a Woman Taken in Adultery, both dated 1917. As in many of Beckmann's paintings, these global and timeless Christian allegories serve as analogies for the suffering of his contemporaries in the war.

The following rooms proceed chronologically through startling graphic series, ordinary landscapes, numerous self-portraits, other major paintings, and the phenomenal triptychs. These three-part paintings were influenced by the artist's love of northern Gothic and Renaissance altarpieces, especially the Isenheim Altar, c. 1510-15, by the luminous German painter, Matthias GrÃ1/4newald (who, incidentally, was the artist who inspired Hindemith's opera, Mathis der Maler.)

Self-Portrait with Red Scarf, 1917. Oil on canvas. © 2003 Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Focusing on just a few: the great triptych Departure (1932-33), owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, uncannily predicts the horrors of the Nazi era just ahead. A mysterious central panel with mother and child and two medieval-looking men in a boat on a blue sea, with a net full of fish, is flanked by two panels portraying senseless, unutterable brutality and torture. The Actors (1941-42) conflates contemporary theatrical personalities, medieval knights, a classical bust, and audience members in a way parallel to Berthold Brecht and other Weimar directors. MoMA's own The Beginning (1946-49) has referents to childhood, with a sword-wielding boy on a white hobbyhorse in the central panel, a classroom scene on the right (with one boy being punished), and a fairytale scene featuring an old organ-grinder on the left. An oversized orange-haired woman reclines on the bottom of the center panel, as an upside down Puss-in-Boots hangs from the ceiling.

Beckmann loved the theater, went frequently, and used many theatrical devices, masks, and costumes as well as fantastic and outlandish situations in his work. Often characters are shown upside down, playing impossible instruments, with body parts amputated. Or they clutch gigantic fish, fall through the air, or perform other freaky feats. Sometimes they consist of masked amalgams, part human and part animal. Over the course of years, the artist's colors become more and more voluptuous, often enclosed by thick black lines, reminiscent of stained glass.

It is this juxtaposition of expression and metaphor, skill and clumsiness, tradition and innovation, plus absolutely gorgeous color and brushwork, that makes Beckmann a great artist. For Juilliard students, the Museum of Modern Art is free of charge. So grab your student ID cards and get on the subway to Queens. It's not far (only about half an hour), and until Sept. 29 you will have the opportunity to see an unforgettable show by an exceptional 20th-century artist. Check out MoMA's Web site (www.moma.org) for a listing of three special programs at various Manhattan locations in conjunction with the Beckmann exhibition.)

MoMA QNS is located at 33rd Street at Queens Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens. Take the No. 7 local train (the express doesn't stop there) from Times Square or Grand Central Station to 33rd Street. MoMA QNS is right across Queens Boulevard from the station. Hours are Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-7:45 p.m. The museum is closed Tuesday and Wednesday.

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.