Overview

"Max Beckmann was labeled a ""degenerate artist"" by the Nazis and chose exile. His artistic production encompassed the figural themes of his early works to the provocatively blunt portraiture, critical urban views, and richly layered symbolic works for which he is now recognized. Although he was a prolific writer, his written work has never before been collected and translated into English. Beckmann is known for the depth, pungency, and tremendous sensuous force of his works, but little is known about his personal life. He carefully distinguished between his public and private writings; he made long pronouncements about art in private and produced strongly personal public statements. This text maps out Beckmann's life and draws attention to the occasions on or for which he produced his writings, to the importance writing had for him as a form of expression, and to both the contemporary and personal references of his ideas and images. This collection reverberates with Beckmann's experience of life as he moved from the first years of his career in Paris and Berlin to the eastern and western fronts of World War I, the rich cultural and artistic world of postwar Frankfurt, exile in Amsterdam, and final years in the United States. Beckmann's early diaries, war letters, formal statements, interviews, and plays present a different view of this most worldly and involved cultural figure."

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This first English edition of Beckmann's writings offers a selection of documents illuminating the life and work of the German painter and graphic artist. Beckmann (1884-1950) belonged to the revolutionary generation of German Expressionist artists who achieved prominence around the time of the First World War. His paintings and drawings frequently take the brutality and cruelty of that war as a principal theme, to which Beckmann brings his signature sense of flattened space, grotesque form, and coarse vitality. Editor Copeland Buenger (Art History/Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) includes excerpts from Beckmann's diaries and letters as well as some complete exhibition statements, brief essays and speeches, and two short dramas. The word, however, was not this master's native element. Even so, the editor and her co-translator make the most of what they have found in the German archives. Certainly anyone interested in Beckmann will want to refer to such documents as his statement On My Painting. It dates from 1938, not long after the Nazis had staged their notorious exhibition against degenerate art in Munich. Beckmann was included among the degenerates. Curiously, though, he has nothing to say about it. The artist thought of himself as unpolitical. He was more interested in what he regarded as the spiritual and the eternal in art. Color, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. This kind of nebulous blather is characteristic of Beckmann, who - as the editor notes in her extensive (and quite helpful) annotations - read the arcane ramblings of Madame Blavatsky as avidly as he read serious philosophers. Surprisingly, and regrettably, this book has only a few illustrations. Still, it should prove to be a useful resource for aficionados and students of modernist art. (Kirkus Reviews)

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