"MAX BECKMANN" par Peter SELZ. Collection Modern Artist. Editions Abbeville Press, New York. 1996. Grand in-8, dos droit, couverture souple cartonnée illustrée. Pages de garde photo. 128 pages. Texte en anglais de Martin Harrison illustré de plus de 110 reproductions photographiques noir & blanc et couleurs, in-texte et hors texte, d'œuvres et de portraits de Max Beckmann.

 

"Recognized as Germany's foremost painter of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann was a major modernist who was by no means satisfied with the dogma that painting must restrict itself to lying flat on the picture plane. Throughout his life he espoused the figurative mode and endowed it With a narrative and often mythical imagery. His art can be difficult to understand because his iconography is so highly personal - a transcendental symbolism that defies verbal explication. Yet it is accessible to those who open themselves to experiencing the artist's creative imagination. Beckmann cannot be pigeonholed into one particular ism. After his early work in a romantic-naturalistic style, he developed a manner of painting that was very much his own. Although he has often been labeled a "German Expressionist," especially by American commentators, he strongly objected to such categorization. To be sure, he shared many of the artistic and spiritual concerns of his Expressionist colleagues, but he was always careful to remain separate from groups and associations, feeling (as he asserted in his 1938 lecture in London) that "the greatest danger which threatens mankind is collectivization." Beckmann had little use for what he considered the decorative, the primitivist, and the abstracting features of Expressionism. Only once, in the pivotal Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition of 1925, did Beckmann allow his work to be shown in the context of a specific group of artists. Like many other artists in the New Objectivity movement, he often found his subjects in political events. His paintings and prints shared with those by his colleagues of that period a certain stillness of the figures and objects, but he went far beyond the sober pictorial constructions of these new realists. For Beckmann realism was, as he himself repeatedly pronounced, a "realism of inner visions." He would have agreed with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that the particular serves to represent the universal, and he paid a great deal of attention to individual details, but it was the universal quality of art and its ultimate values that Beckmann had most in mind…"

 

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