Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  In the 1920s, a period of relative calm, personal happiness, and professional success, Beckmann is most down-to-earth. His paintings of Frankfurt contain fantastic elements: church spires that didn’t exist, factories in the wrong places, shapes of houses, bridges, and streetlamps blown up out of proportion. But this is still an observed world, most of which actually existed outside Beckmann’s own mind. Those people bathing at the Lido (1924) or dancing in Baden-Baden (1923) could well have been there, even if they were changed in Beckmann’s vision into helpless, almost somnambulistic figures, unaware of the catastrophes that lay in wait for them. The dancers, packed together inside the picture frame, look in danger of suffocating, if not from a lack of fresh air, then perhaps from boredom. The swimmers are falling backward, swept away by the surf, like playthings of violent nature.

  It is in the 1930s, with Hitler’s rise, that Beckmann turns more and more to a world that existed entirely in his own mind, a world of myths and allegories mixed with the nightclub scenes and circus performances that continued to feed his imagination. By the time he was denounced by Hitler’s artistic arbiters as a degenerate artist in 1937, Beckmann was at the top of his powers. The triptych entitled Temptation (1936–1937) is a sadomasochistic phantasmagoria, featuring a murderous Nordic god, a sinister young liftboy in a Berlin hotel leading a crawling woman by a leash, a sexy blonde chained to a spear, a caged society woman cradling a fox and pecked by a diabolical bird, and a shackled man holding up a mirror to a voluptuous nude.

  Here are Beckmann’s habitual themes: violence between men and women, sensual bondage in a world of evil. But they are put into the grisly contemporary setting of the Nazi state, where former liftboys really could have power, and Nordic gods came to represent sheer malevolence. In this painting, Beckmann found the perfect balance between reality and myth, in which the metaphysical looked real and reality resembled a fantasy. He was always after this effect of dreamlike realism, and was delighted when he saw it reflected in real life. On one of his solitary visits to an Amsterdam dance hall just after the war, he suddenly spotted Cary Grant. At first, he noted in his diary, “I thought it was a scene in a movie. Strangely unreal.”

  Beckmann’s paintings of sexual violence are never pretty, of course. He criticized Picasso and Matisse for making their art too decorative, too much like beautiful wallpaper. Not enough German Innerlichkeit, perhaps. But whereas Picasso could in fact be brutally aggressive in his paintings of women, Beckmann’s women always look seductive. Sex is never disgusting, as it is in paintings by some of his German contemporaries (Otto Dix, say). He seems to be saying that if sex, and women, were not so beguiling, we would not feel so enslaved by our desires.

  The day after Hitler’s radio speech about degenerate art, on July 18, 1937, Beckmann packed his bags and moved to Amsterdam with his second wife, Quappi, never to return to Germany. His state of mind as an artistic refugee (Beckmann was neither Jewish nor overtly political) is beautifully revealed in his self-portraits of that time. One of them, ironically entitled Released, shows him in chains, his ashen face a portrait of despair. On his left shoulder you can just make out the word “Amerika,” the Beckmanns’ actual destination before they got stuck in Amsterdam. A self-portrait painted in 1938 is one of his most beautiful. The horn, a favorite symbol of art and sexual power, is reversed and held to his ear, like a huge ear trumpet. Beckmann is dressed in what looks like a striped dressing gown but could also be a convict’s uniform. In exile, he retreated into his studio on the first floor of a tobacco warehouse, the horn his symbolic receptacle of news from the monstrous world outside.

  One of the peculiar things about Beckmann’s paintings in Amsterdam, where he lived until he finally left for America in 1947, is that so few of them show anything of the city itself. Many are of Beckmann’s singular imaginary world of myths and symbols. Others are created from memory: Dream of Monte Carlo (1940), for example, a nightmare gambling casino in sickly yellows and greens, filled with demonic gamblers, sluttish women, and masked men about to release bombs. Others still are claustrophobic theater scenes full of personal terrors. In the middle of a triptych, The Actors (1941–1942), Beckmann himself appears, wearing a crown and stabbing himself in the chest with a sword.

  As a German artist in a provincial capital under German occupation, Beckmann was almost totally isolated. The Dutch took little notice of him, and the Nazis could only regard this “degenerate” artist with the deepest distrust. Other German exiles, in similar circumstances, committed suicide or lapsed into a state of depressive inertia. Not Beckmann. He painted, and painted, and painted. The fact that he had never been a joiner was surely a help.

  Beckmann despised any collective activity. For a time, in the 1910s, he was a member of the Berlin Secession, but soon quit after disagreements with his fellow artists. “The sportsmaniac is the soul of the collective man,” he wrote in 1925. When asked, in 1928, what he felt about politics, he answered:

  I am a painter, or, according to a highly unsympathetic collective notion, an artist. In any case, somehow displaced. Displaced also in politics. This [political] enterprise can only become of interest to me, once it has done with the materialist era, and turns in a new way to metaphysical, or transcendental, or religious matters.

  Beckmann always had been offshore: the solitary drinker at the hotel bar full of revelers.

  This was true, even among fellow exiles in Amsterdam, whom he did meet from time to time. In Four Men Around a Table (1943), we see four German exiles, a philosopher and three painters, one of whom is Beckmann. They are jumbled together, like prisoners in a cell. The colors are somber, the mood gloomy. A huge candle illuminates the faces of three men, one holding a fish, the other two holding vegetables—a reference perhaps to the lack of food, but at the same time symbolic of their personalities. Beckmann, alone, sits in the shadow, with a mirror in his hand.

  The Amsterdam paintings are among the darkest but also the best of Beckmann’s works. Other famous artists of the Weimar period went into inner emigration or languished abroad. Otto Dix was reduced to painting mawkish Christmas-card landscapes in Germany. Grosz, in New York, celebrated Americana or did unsuccessful allegorical pictures of Nazi Germany. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner died, a broken man, in 1938. Emil Nolde stayed in Germany but was not allowed to paint. But Beckmann, like Max Ernst, another survivor, carried his world in his head, and that is what you see in his Amsterdam paintings.

  Even after the war was over, and Beckmann was able to exhibit again, the darkness of his visions did not immediately let up. Men and women are still chained together in iron cages, and the carnival figures in grotesque masks are still in evidence. So are the ladders, as a means to ascend to higher things, and the phallic swords. But there is hope of a new beginning, a new life in the new world, and something of that optimism begins to shine through.

  One of the most moving paintings, The Cabins, was painted in 1948, after he had moved with his wife to the US. Inspired by their voyage aboard the Westerdam from Rotterdam to New York, the painting is a kind of X-ray of life on an ocean liner, but with strange metaphysical touches: here a young woman is combing her hair, there a couple is making love, there a person is drawing a ship, and there an angel is displaying herself, it seems, to a kind of slave driver with a whip. Cutting right through all this is an old sailor, Beckmann himself, tied to a giant fish.

  This fish, in Beckmann’s art, as well as in myths, is a symbol of fertility, of sexuality, of knowledge, but also of the soul. It is, in this painting, as if Beckmann is sailing to the New World with his creative soul intact. He was sixty-three, and despite some old-fashioned European doubts about the superficiality of American culture, he was excited by what he saw. In New York, he wrote, “The tower of Babylon has … become the mass erection of a monstrous (senseless?) will. So I like it.”

  The color and energy of the US appealed to Beckmann’s sensual side. His paintings become brighter. The Town, painted in New York in 1950, contains the famili
ar Beckmann symbols: severed heads, phallic candles, swords, and what look like two giant black dildos. But it is not a hellish scene. Death is very much there, of course. A dark figure with a grotesque protruding tongue, like the corpse of a hanged man, points to another world beyond the frame of the picture.

  But there is still life, in the beautiful nude woman inviting sex, as an American minstrel plays his guitar by her bedside.

  And yet Beckmann felt too old, too tired, and too ill to give in any longer to what he liked to call the illusions of desire. The war years had damaged him, mentally and physically, and he had a serious heart condition. It is always interesting to see how a great artist faces his mortality. Picasso tried to defy the onset of impotence and the closing in of death in a last bravura performance of furious eroticism. Beckmann, partly no doubt inspired by his mystical readings, saw death more as a release, a liberation even, a journey to another world. He told his wife, Quappi, that death just meant a change of clothes, a “metaphysical move.” He would be naked as the figure in Falling Man (1950), tumbling into a blue, watery abyss.

  It is tempting, as some writers on Beckmann have done, to see intimations of his death in the last paintings. Christiane Zeiller, one of the contributors to the catalog of the Paris exhibition, suggests that the old god in The Argonauts is pointing the way to the world of the dead. Others have speculated that Beckmann’s last self-portrait, painted in 1950, of the artist dressed in a bright blue jacket, standing in front of a canvas while smoking a cigarette and staring, not at the viewer but at some distant spot, is a picture of an old man’s vision of his own death.

  It is possible. All we know for sure is that Beckmann finished The Argonauts on December 26. The next day he left his apartment at 38 West 69th Street, to go to an exhibition of new American art. One of the paintings on show was his Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket. On the corner of Central Park West and 61st Street, he had a heart attack and died.

  1 Der Künstler im Staat, quoted in Max Beckmann, Die Realität der Träume in den Bildern (Munich: Piper, 1990).

  2 George Grosz: Berlin–New York (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1994), p. 36.

  3 Die Realität der Träume in den Bildern, p. 34.

  4 Max Beckmann: Un Peintre dans l’histoire, catalog of the exhibition edited by Didier Ottinger (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002).

  5 These letters became “Letters to a Woman Painter,” a lecture given at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri, in February 1948.

  6 Reinhard Spieler, Beckmann (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1995), p. 180.

  22

  DEGENERATE ART

  WHEN ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER put a pistol to his head in Davos, Switzerland, on June 15, 1938, he left more than a thousand oil paintings, several thousand pastels, drawings, and prints, as well as many wood carvings and textiles. Only a fraction of his work was shown at an extraordinary exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.1 But this fraction probably comprises the very best of his oeuvre. A handful of paintings, executed just before and during World War I, of Berlin streets filled with elegant whores, some in black war-widow garb, are accompanied by a number of exquisite drawings and woodcuts, some on the same subject matter, some of nudes, and some of a variety of urban scenes.

  The most famous painting is simply entitled Berlin Street Scene (1913). The long and sordid story of its provenance—originally acquired by a Jewish shoe manufacturer named Hess, then passed on in a series of murky transactions after the Hess family had to flee from the Nazis, only to emerge in German museum collections after the war before being returned to the original owner’s heirs, who sold it to Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York for $38 million—is the subject of an entire book recently published in Germany.2 Painted in feverish blue, red, and yellow streaks, the picture shows two prostitutes (cocottes in the Berlin jargon of the time), dressed to the nines, casting lizard-eyed looks at the blurred crowd of men around them, one of whom looks away, a cigarette dangling from his crimson lips. It has been suggested that this man might be the artist himself, alone, aloof, cut off from the crowd.

  Kirchner’s paintings, drawings, and prints of Berlin streets with cocottes on the prowl have become icons of the twentieth-century metropolis, fast, mechanical, dense, anonymous, and full of erotic possibilities. The artist created with his brush or chisel what his friend the expressionist writer Alfred Döblin did with his pen, most notably in his great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: fragmented images of buildings and streetcars, the jazzy syncopation of masses of people rushing hither and thither, their pale city faces turned yellow and green by flickering headlights, streetlamps, and neon signs. An element of danger is suggested by the jagged edges of sidewalks and the sharp toes of the prostitutes’ boots.

  In her informative and clearly written catalog essay, Deborah Wye says that Kirchner “made the unusual choice of the prostitute as his primary symbol” of metropolitan life. In fact, it wasn’t so unusual. The prostitute has been a symbol of urban decadence ever since the Whore of Babylon, and Wye herself, quoting from a German source, explains why this has been especially true in modern times: “What holds for them also holds for the mass-produced goods of the time: they ‘flaunt, entice, provoke desire.’ ” The thing about big cities, from Babylon to Berlin, is that every desire can be satisfied with the right amount of cash—except, perhaps, true love.

  The Berlin street paintings have come to define Kirchner’s work. The later paintings of Swiss Alpine landscapes are of less interest, and his earlier portraits and nudes, though often remarkable, are not quite so well known.3 It is interesting to compare Kirchner’s reputation with Emil Nolde’s. Both were part of the same artistic circles and marked by similar enthusiasms. Nolde, too, depicted typical Berlin scenes of cabarets, nightclubs, and dancers, but is now much better known for his brooding, almost abstract land- and seascapes.

  There seem to have been at least two great breaks in Kirchner’s career. The first occurred when he moved to Berlin in 1911, leaving behind the cozy bohemia of expressionist Dresden. The second was when he left Germany in 1917 to settle in Switzerland. So the great Berlin period lasted only six years. How to reconcile those years of frenzied urban activity with the periods before and after? Or was there more continuity than meets the eye? Therein lies one of the fascinations of Kirchner’s art and life.

  Born in 1880 in Lower Franconia, Kirchner was the son of well-to-do bourgeois parents; his father, Ernst, was an engineer and a professor. Like many young men from well-to-do bourgeois families, Kirchner rebelled against his comfortable background and tried to find a more authentic, more natural, more artistic way of living in bohemian circles that liked to “go back to nature” by walking around in the nude, whether in artists’ studios or in idyllic rural settings, such as the Moritzburg lakes around Dresden. Some of the bohemians also enjoyed roughing it a little by living among “real” people in poor urban areas.

  Kirchner founded Die Brücke (the Bridge) in Dresden with fellow expressionists, such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, and Otto Müller. Following Van Gogh and the French fauvists, especially Matisse, the German expressionists celebrated emotional spontaneity and “naturalness” by experimenting with wild brushstrokes and bold primary colors. The call of the “primitive”—African masks, American “Negro music,” tropical islands, and so on—was also part of the quest for authenticity. And here, too, they took the cue from Paris: Gauguin, Picasso, and, of course, Matisse.

  Photographs of Kirchner’s Dresden and Berlin studios show how this quest spilled into the artist’s life as well: drapery decorated with couples having sex, objects from Africa and Oceania, the artist and various models dancing in the nude. The Brücke artists worked together, lived together, made trips together, and made love together, freely exchanging partners and models. They were, in Kirchner’s phrase, “one big family.” The aim was “free drawing of free individuals in free naturalness.”

  The French were clearly an inspiration. Yet perhaps as a form o
f self-defense, Kirchner in particular stressed how German his art was and denied, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, the influence of his contemporaries in France. When he was living in Davos in 1923, to recuperate from his many nervous breakdowns (made worse by bouts of excessive drinking), Kirchner mused in his diary that he was “Germanic like no other artist.” This was true, up to a point. Kirchner often mentioned Dürer as an inspiration. The name Die Brücke came from Nietzsche’s dictum that man was a bridge, not an endpoint. The cult of natural behavior was part of a larger movement in early-twentieth-century Germany: Wandervögel hiking through mountain and dale, nudists frolicking on Baltic beaches. And then there was the tendency to spiritual brooding.

  Kirchner, unlike, say, Nolde, was not attracted to National Socialism, despite his naive and short-lived hope in the early 1930s that the Führer might be good for Germany. But in his spiritual moods he came close to falling into the clichés of Romantic German chauvinism. Germanic art, he said, including his own, “is religion in the widest sense of the word.” It is the “expression of [my] dreams,” transcendental, profound, art as suffering and redemption, and never art for art’s sake, as practiced in France. The French, rationalistic, civilized, urbane, cynical, could only reproduce, describe, or depict nature, and never express it directly. Thus, in Kirchner’s view, “we can say that we [Germans] form the soul of humanity.”

  Much of this is poppycock. But then Kirchner was known to be a bit of a mythomaniac whose words should never be taken at face value. In any case, the Berlin street scenes are hardly typical expressions of German soulfulness; on the contrary, they are a direct response to the cynical here and now. And the here and now of Berlin in the early 1910s was not easy for Kirchner. Largely through his own fault, Die Brücke was disbanded in 1913, leaving Kirchner feeling cast adrift and sorry for himself. His career did not flourish. A large international show of modern art held in Berlin did not include his work. And fretting about becoming too bourgeois in his habits, he fell into depression, took too much veronal, and drank a liter of absinthe a day.