Schiele’s Living Dead

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2025

Schiele’s Living Dead

On “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” at the Neue Galerie, New York.

For an artist now best known for his desiccated portraits, “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes,” on view at New York’s Neue Galerie through mid-January, adds some necessary water to the flower pot.1 With their exposed, contorted flesh, Schiele’s figures even today appear shriveled and deathlike—and unnecessarily brutalized. Those uncompromising bodies seemed to come out of nowhere when Schiele first conjured them up like an act of necromancy in 1910—a mad, mannered departure from whatever figuration had preceded them, even for the artist himself. Writing in 1912, the art critic Adalbert F. Seligmann took note of Schiele’s

gruesome-fantastical caricatures . . . ghostly lemurs with bloody spider fingers, mutilated, half-decomposed corpses, as if caught in a distorting mirror . . . . [T]he painting seems to have been taken from thousand-year-old graves.

Depending on how you take your art, such an assessment could be considered damning or the highest praise.

That same year, far from helping the case, Schiele was arrested for the kidnapping and defilement of an underage girl. The Neue show glosses over this incident, as those interested in this artist’s reputation have long swept questions of Schiele’s character under the Secessionist rug. Although he was acquitted of these particular charges, Schiele was found guilty of public immorality for displaying his nude figures in his studio with minors present and sentenced to twenty-four days in jail. Such early indictments against Schiele might still find a sympathetic jury today—and did, in fact, in 2018. The hundredth anniversary of his death at age twenty-eight came just in time for #MeToo and saw the artist’s posthumous appraisal unfairly brought before the court of social-media opinion.

Egon Schiele, Krumau Townscape, 1912, Oil on panel, Private Collection.

The Neue Galerie’s current exhibition—curated by Christian Bauer, the founding director of the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems—introduces some exculpatory evidence to the shock and awe of Schiele’s stark figures while also revealing the “life” and “landscape” that in fact occupied a majority of his output. Compared to the one-hundred-thirty-odd nudes and portraits he created in his lifetime, Schiele composed nearly one hundred seventy landscapes, townscapes, and natural scenes during his intense but brief period of creative work.

Rather than the prurient cosmopolitan that his ill-formed nudes might suggest, at least according to this exhibition and its rather impenetrable catalogue of essays in translation, Schiele was a spiritually driven provincial who sought the divine in nature. Born in the hinterlands outside Vienna in a stationmaster’s apartment on the line to the imperial city, Schiele as a boy filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the local countryside. One of his early interests was the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. His first exhibition took place at the Augustinian monastery in Klosterneuburg, where for a time he studied and lived. In 1906, at the age of sixteen, he arrived at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as its youngest student, where he burned to reveal a pastoral religiosity through his work.

This is not all to suggest that Schiele was a prime candidate to join his local Rotary Club. In his 1979 book Symbolism, Robert Goldwater identified the late nineteenth-century fervor to “make emotion meaningful, by connecting it with humanity at large and by seeing nature as its reflection.” For Vincent van Gogh, for example, that meant making “each object such a microcosm of an animized universe vibrating with his own feelings, that it is, in this new sense, a symbol—of himself and of a pantheistic spirit.” For Schiele (who was most likely exposed to Van Gogh through exhibitions in Vienna in 1906 and 1909), a Romantic sense of place combined with an ardent Symbolist faith in the power of depicting the cycles of life and death—which in turn flowed through the godlike self-conception of this headstrong, wunderkind artist. “A divine human being always leads the crowd!” Schiele proclaimed. “So let it be said: that the artist is the only one who is the ruler, the dominator, of 100, 1,000, and 10,000, that he creates only for himself, because it is the same as breathing.” Never one for understatement, he continued, “An artist above all is the one of great spiritual gifts.”

Egon Schiele, Town Among the Greenery (The Old City III), 1917, Oil on canvas, Neue Galerie, New York.

Schiele’s gift, at least as he understood it, was for revealing the spirits of life and making them manifest in oil. “I can speak with all living creatures, even with plants and stones; speak, speak directly into their face, into their essence,” he said.

Every tree has its face; I recognize its kind of eyes, its kind of arms, its components, its organism. I want to be addressed by everything!—My act is the answer.

For Schiele, God “breathes much more clearly in a field.” As the Viennese art collector Rudolf Leopold said of Schiele, he approached “landscape envisioned as a cathedral.”

In his interests in animism and pantheism, Schiele found ready affinity with the lingering pre-Christian sentiments that took quick root in Austria through such social scientists as Erwin Hanslik, a now largely forgotten figure who was the founder of the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute of Cultural Research) in Vienna, one who gathered the artistic elite around his belief in a Weltkulturgesellschaft (world-cultural society). Working directly with Schiele on the supposed connections between landscape and skull shape, Hanslik saw in Austria, in particular, a “humanity as it truly is, as an earth person, as a powerful, earth-bound spiritual being.”

When not dabbling in phrenology (Schiele even provided the phenotypic head illustrations for Hanslik’s book Wesen der Menschheit—“the essence of humanity”—which is now about as démodé as it gets), the artist worked through several fine but indistinct watercolors and gouaches in Klosterneuburg. Silhouette of Klosterneuburg (ca. 1906, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten) and The Blacksmith’s Courtyard in Klosterneuburg (1906, Stiftsmuseum, Kosterneururg) speak to Schiele’s interest in local topographies but give little hint of the compositional innovations he developed over the next few years.

Egon Schiele, City on the Blue River I (Dead City I), 1910, Gouache with glue & black crayon on paper, Private Collection.

In 1907, as a student in Vienna, Schiele met Gustav Klimt, his elder by nearly thirty years, who became a mentor and influence—and who happened to be the subject of a revelatory landscape show at the Neue Galerie less than a year ago (see “Summer lights” in The New Criterion of June 2024). For the next few years, Schiele worked though Klimt-like modes of composition that interwove figure and ground into a dappled whole. Summer Night (1907, private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York) and Drying Laundry (1908, Kallir Family Foundation) are two of these small highlights of oil on cardboard—or rather “lowlights,” as their indistinct forms and fading illumination convey a haunting presence. Current of Youth (Danaë) (1909, the Lewis Collection), an astonishing concatenation of figure and ground in which a nude melts into the sinuous vines of a dark stream, reveals Schiele’s full debt to Klimt and announced the young artist’s arrival when shown in his first group exhibition in Vienna that year. (If only this nuanced work had been hung lower down at the Neue and not in the glare of gallery lights above a mantelpiece.)

Schiele’s true compositional breakthrough occurred the following year, when he stripped away this integration of figure and ground and placed his subjects—animal, vegetable, and mineral—in free-floating white relief. Sunflower I (1908, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), of falling petals and wilted leaves, set off by a scumbled white ground, hints at how this process began in his natural still lifes before influencing the progression of his portraiture.

A central gallery in this exhibition is titled “My Transformations” (with Schiele, it’s always me, me, me). Here we are presented with a suite of gnarled figures alongside his depictions of peasant jugs and chestnut trees. A gouache and pencil on paper titled Wilted Sunflower from 1912 (private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute) speaks most directly to the portraits here assembled in both composition and tonality. In Schiele’s monistic imagination, figures such as those in his Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910, private collection) and Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovšek) (1910, private collection) are merely the dry leaves and branches of plants in another form. By floating them in fields of dingy white, Schiele further conveys the provisional sketchiness of life—man as little more than stick figure, here revealed by a numinous artist–god as depicted in Self-Portrait in Peacock Waistcoat, Standing (1911, Ernst Ploil, Vienna).

Through such mortifications of the flesh, Schiele connected his art with the melancholy light of a particular central-European sensibility. “My essence—my putrescence,” is how this artist once summed things up. In his stick-bug portraits, squashed as though stepped on by society’s shoe, Schiele presents a vision of human metamorphosis that is Kafkaesque—or perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that Franz Kafka was Schielesque. For the painter, the Fall of Man and the season of fall came together in an imagination that fixated on the cycles of decay and rebirth in the Crucifixion. In his native Austria, Schiele saw his own Calvary Hill (with the tortured artist, of course, on that cross).

Egon Schiele, Sunflower I, 1908, Oil on cardboard, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten.

Rather than some Futurism, Schiele most strongly identified with the Gothic. In his punk appearance, he was himself the original goth. In the Neue’s largest gallery, titled “My Places,” we can see how his treatment of geometric forms and mottled color, set off by thick black lines, calls to mind nothing less than ecclesiastical stained glass. Houses by the River II (The Old City II) (1914, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) is a tour de force of translucent rectangles. Several of the works here are little more than sketches, a continuation of the artist’s interest in the local typologies of house, river, and street—Group of Houses on a Mountain (1912, Albertina, Vienna), Old Houses in Krumau (1914, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), and Supply Depot, Trento Branch: Exterior View with Notice Board (1917, private collection). The highlight in the mix is the Neue Galerie’s own Town among Greenery (The Old City III) (1917). Here the triangular rooflines of a gemütlich village, surrounded by greenery, grow up through Schiele’s picture plane like the bark of an ancient tree.

It was Schiele’s fate never to take such root himself but rather to wither on the vine of youth. Itinerant as a boy even before his father’s attempted suicide and death, which sent him into the guardianship of his Bohemian uncle, Schiele was further uprooted by the First World War. In 1918, just days after his wife Edith Harms, six months pregnant, died of influenza, Schiele himself succumbed to the ravages of the Spanish Flu. A final, funereal gallery titled “My Self-Portraits” ends with the plaster Death Mask of Egon Schiele (1918), a gift to the Neue Galerie from the scholar Alessandra Comini, who curated the museum’s blockbuster exhibition of Schiele portraits in 2014. Obsessed with depicting the cycle of life, Schiele was far from wrong in his early premonitions of death.

1. “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on October 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 13, 2025. ↩

Summer lights

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2024

Summer Lights

On “Klimt Landscapes” at Neue Galerie, “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” at Acquavella Galleries & “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” at Bookstein Projects, New York.

A distinguishing feature of modern art has been its pursuit of light. Of course, all of visual art is concerned with light. What modernism did was dispense with the controlled light of the salon in search of bolder and brighter sensations. Modern painters looked to reflect not merely a sense of sight but also the feeling of radiance. So they explored direct light and, in particular, summer light, chasing the sun into the countryside with their trunks of painting equipment in tow.

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was one of those painters whose compositional innovations were charged by the summer sun. A recent survey at Neue Galerie titled “Klimt Landscapes” looked not only to the verdant visions he captured in the Austrian towns alongside the Attersee between 1900 and 1916, but also to the lush creative landscape that unfurled around him in photography, jewelry, and fashion.1

Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, Oil & gold on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Today Klimt is most renowned for his “golden style.” His bejeweled portraits reached their apotheosis in such works at Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901), also known as Judith I, and The Kiss (1908–09), both in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. His Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the “lady in gold” restituted from Vienna to the subject’s Jewish heirs, now forms the heart of Neue’s permanent collection. In these works, Klimt, the son of a gold engraver, combined the decadence of precious metal with a sense for mosaic-like composition, taking inspiration from the shadowless Byzantine iconography in Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale.

Yet Klimt was more than an iconographer. He looked to move beyond these studied, labor-intensive portraits even as he relied on them to provide income for his large domestic payroll (he fathered at least six children with three mistresses while supporting multiple members of his extended family, including his widowed sister-in-law, Emilie “Midi” Flöge, a fashion designer and his muse). Klimt found relief in the Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria, north of Salzburg. Each summer, after 1900, he traveled there from Vienna to paint along the lake towns of the Attersee.

Gustav Klimt, The Park, 1909, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Organized by Janis Staggs, Neue’s director of curatorial and manager of publications, “Klimt Landscapes” took a welcome, wide-angle view of these creative sojourns. The exhibition brought together such masterpieces as The Park (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Kammer Castle on the Attersee I (Castle in the Lake) (1908, National Gallery Prague), and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914, Neue Galerie). The survey assembled works dating back to Klimt’s academic training and continuing on through his many experiments with optics, providing along the way several examples of jewelry by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser together with many photographic portraits of Klimt’s own projections of summer leisure.

Trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts of the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, known today as the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Klimt proved to be a precocious academic talent. The exhibition began with his figure studies of 1880 and his Two Girls with Oleander (ca. 1890–92, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), an astonishing vision of glowing Pre-Raphaelite women plucking flowers beside an egg-and-dart frieze.

Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, ca. 1890–92, Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.

Seeing Klimt’s command of painterly illusion makes his modernist compression, developed just a few years later, all the more remarkable. A founding member of the Vienna Secession in 1897, he joined fellow academic painters to look beyond the style of the salon. Yet for all of its innovative surface application, Klimt’s subsequent golden style owed much to academic structure. Beneath the ornament, his shimmering portraits were essentially salon paintings. Part academic, part modern, these works were dismissed by the devotees of either camp. Klimt remained largely absent, for example, from the French-focused timeline of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As such distinctions have diminished over time, however, the hybrid nature of these works has only made them more compelling. Today his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I has become known as “Austria’s Mona Lisa” and attracts commensurate crowds and Hollywood fanfare, serving as the focus of the 2015 biographical drama Woman in Gold.

The relief provided by the Attersee owed in part to the fact that Klimt had received little academic training in landscape painting, which was considered a lower genre than history painting and portraiture. This lack of schooling left Klimt free to experiment with the Stimmungsimpressionismus, or “atmospheric impressions,” that he felt during his Sommerfrische, “summer holidays.” Unlike his studied portraits, Klimt painted his landscapes without preparatory sketches. The unidealized composition of this “vacation work” helps underscore the leisure of their creation. Klimt viewed his landscape painting as a segment of his daily therapy. A letter from August 1902 outlines his summer workout routine:

Early in the morning, about 6 . . . I get up—if the weather’s good I go to the nearby wood—I’m painting a small beech wood there (if the sun’s shining) . . . that takes me to 8, then comes breakfast, then a swim in the lake, carefully of course—then I paint a little, perhaps a view of the lake by sunlight, or if the weather’s dull a landscape from my window—sometimes I drop this morning painting and study my Japanese books . . . Then comes midday, after lunch I sleep a little or read, and before or after tea another swim . . . After tea I’m painting again . . . . Every now and then I fit a bit of rowing into the day’s program in order to limber up.

A proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Klimt saw himself as a piece of that “total work of art.” In the summer he dressed the part by dispensing with the cummerbund and donning a blue, caftan-style painter’s smock. (Early Christmas shoppers, take note: Neue’s gift shop features an “exact replica” of this full length indigo linen smock with “hand-embroidered white epaulets and front pocket.”) Klimt appears in repeated photographs around the Attersee in this getup, walking on docks and strolling on trails, even as the figures around him didn’t always get the caftan memo, appearing in more standard summer outfits.

Beech Forest in Autumn, 1898. Photo: Hugo Henneberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

One revelation of this survey was the extent to which photography influenced and shaped Klimt’s own artistic landscape. “It would be difficult to overestimate the sizable impact of photography on Klimt’s development as a landscape painter,” writes Staggs in the exhibition’s catalogue. The Austrian Camera Club of Amateur Photographers, later known as the Vienna Camera Club, was established in 1887. Klimt surrounded himself with photographers such as Moriz Nähr, Heinrich Böhler, and Emma Bacher-Teschner, and he regularly posed as their subject. Klimt developed his own unusual, square landscape format largely under the influence of their often-square images. He also used telescopes and photographic aids to help compose his paintings, flattening his landscapes and even drawing on the patterns of photographic emulsion. Just compare Hugo Henneberg’s photograph Birch Forest in Autumn (1898, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) with Klimt’s Beech Forest I of circa 1902 (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden), or Heinrich Kuehn’s Meadow with Trees (1897, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna) with Klimt’s Pear Tree (Pear Trees) (1903, Harvard Art Museums). Klimt painted his landscapes in the style of this early photography.

Gustav Klimt, Beech Forest I, 1902, Oil on canvas, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

The remarkable set of Autochrome Lumière color photographs that Friedrich G. “Fritz” Walker took of Emilie Flöge and Klimt, in the garden of Villa Paulick in September of 1913, then brought the exhibition full circle. Early photography, in particular color photography, was especially light-intensive and relied on the same summer sun as did Klimt. Here in colorful costumes he and Flöge appear as both subjects and objects—flattened into their own lush landscapes in these photographic “drawings with light.” From “lady in gold,” we end with artists in green.

The advent of summer can be particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021). The late grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia remains on view at Acquavella Galleries through mid-June with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career, ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones.2

Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles), ca. 1985, Watercolor on paper, Collection of Matt and Maria Bult.

Painted with a sugary impasto, this masterly work can seem fresh and ready to melt in the summer sun. Thiebaud was the American Giorgio Morandi for his uncanny ability to transform paint into the subjects he depicted. In part this is due to the halation effects along his edges, as shadows are broken into lines and fields of blue and red that become delicate frosting for his forms, as seen in such works as Strawberry Cone (1969) and Two Tulip Sundaes (2010) and even such portraits as Betty Jean (ca. 1965). Thiebaud was particularly attuned to the textures of his media. His thirst-quenching Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles) (ca. 1985) would only work as a watercolor on paper. His Cheese Display (1969) feels milky-smooth, while his Beach Gathering (2000–15) appears encrusted with sand. Due to this innate sense for intimism, I find his portraits and still lifes work better than his landscapes. Thiebaud was at his best when subject and painting could melt into one.

The paintings in “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon,” on view last month at Bookstein Projects, spanned a remarkable eighty years.3 A suite of bold new work, of celestial bodies pared down to brushstroke, color, and form, all painted in Resika’s ninety-fifth year, was connected to Moonlight, a small landscape executed in 1943–44, when the artist was just sixteen years old. Beyond the official show, the gallery’s office also featured an extra work from the artist’s collection: Panorama of the Hudson (The Mermaid and the Factory) (1948), a wild composition of bridges, train tracks, and the ghost-like rollercoaster of the long-departed Palisades Amusement Park—painted at a time when the teenage artist could catch a ferry there just across town from his Central
Harlem studio.

Paul Resika, Moonlight, 1943–44, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects, New York.

The brightness and compositions may have varied, but everywhere a minimum of line defined depth in what were otherwise blind, blinding, and turbulent sights. Illuminated across time, the full assembly revealed a consistency of vision and a connected sense for the bare essentials. Revisiting the illusion of light in paint, Resika in his latest work has doubled down on the experimental quality of what can be done with a minimum of means. In several canvases, a simple dash, placed just right, becomes a horizon line reflecting the luminous spheres above. These orbs, all of slightly different values, meanwhile appear to fill the canvases with various shades of glowing color. “Marcel Breuer told me never to paint a green picture,” Resika explained to me when I ran into him at the gallery. So he did just that. This painter, who has been bucking convention for eighty years, remains a guiding light for the daring possibilities of oil on canvas.

Paul Resika, End of the Day #12, Oil on canvas, 2023, Bookstein Projects, New York.

1. “Klimt Landscapes” was on view at Neue Galerie, New York, from February 15 through May 6, 2024. 

2. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” opened at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on April 26 and remains on view through June 14, 2024. 

3. “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” was on view at Bookstein Projects, New York, from April 18 through May 31, 2024. 

Under Pressure

Under Pressure

On “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925” at Neue Galerie.

Max Beckmann reflected the traumas of the First World War from his own German perspective. As a volunteer medical orderly in East Prussia in 1914, he wrote to his first wife, Minna Beckmann-Tube, that he “experienced dreadful things and died myself with them several times.” A year later, he suffered a nervous breakdown while serving in Belgium. An exhibition now at Neue Galerie looks to what the show calls Beckmann’s “formative years,” from 1915 through 1925, following this wartime service, in a focused presentation that helps us better locate one of the last century’s more enigmatic artists.1 Curated by Olaf Peters, a professor at Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925” brings together one hundred works by the artist to present the decade-long period when Beckmann broke away from an Impressionist-like style to pursue what became known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).

For Beckmann, the trenches of the Western Front mirrored something of his own pitched battles with French modernism. He called Henri Matisse, for example, one of the “untalented persons” of contemporary art. As Peters notes in the exhibition catalogue, “Max Beckmann adopted early on a position against the artistic avant-garde and did not shy away from public controversy when doing so.” In the face of Fauvism, Primitivism, Expressionism, and the other -isms of modern painting, Beckmann looked to create his own distinctly Germanic contemporary art, one influenced by Wilhelm Leibl, Max Liebermann, Adolf Menzel, and other “instructive artists,” as he put it, of the late nineteenth century.

Max Beckmann, Christ and the Sinner, 1917, Oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York.

Even as Beckmann worked certain elements of cubist fracture and expressionistic draftsmanship into his compositions, he pushed past modernism’s surface interests to remain focused on the depth of pictorial space. “As for myself,” he wrote in a statement titled “The New Program,” “I paint and try to develop my style exclusively in terms of deep space, something that in contrast to superficially decorative art penetrates as far as possible into the very core of nature and the spirit of things.”

Beckmann’s powers of penetration are on display in the exhibition’s compressed opening gallery on Neue’s second floor. The presentation begins with three self-portraits—a drypoint print, a drawing in pen and ink, and another drawing in pencil, all from 1916 and 1917 (on loan respectively from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Gaunt and sickly, with hands bony and clutched, the faces here seem “almost too awake,” notes Peters, revealing Beckmann’s alien-like “diagnostic gaze.” Far from romanticized, they are Germanified self-images, ones that turn to the horrors of sight and choose not to look away.

Max Beckmann, Adam and Eve, 1917, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin, Germany. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York.

Those horrors are reflected in Beckmann’s angular and emaciated biblical images to their right—Descent from the Cross (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Christ and the Sinner (1917, Saint Louis Art Museum), and Adam and Eve (1917, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). “I saw some remarkable things,” Beckmann said of his time at the front. “In the semidarkness of the shelter, half-naked, blood-covered men that were having white bandages applied. Grand and painful in expression. New visions of scourgings of Christ.”

Beckmann’s great gift was to understand how the urgency of contemporary art should be reflected in the substance of painting rather than in its style. Distancing himself from the many movements of modernism—even including the Neue Sachlichkeit with which he became closely associated—Beckmann came to be seen as a “defender of a traditional art oriented around representational skill,” writes Anna Maria Heckmann of Berlinische Galerie, “which is why a reputation as a reactionary clung to him from the perspective of his avant-garde colleagues.”

Max Beckmann, Landscape with Balloon, 1917, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York.

Nevertheless, in the originality of his vision, unencumbered by any one style, Beckmann ended up outflanking his more radical peers. Compare the classical roundedness of Portrait of Senior Medical Officer Prof. Dr. Philaletes Kuhn (1915, private collection) with the grotesqueries of Adam and Eve (1917, published 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Or contrast the loftiness of Landscape with Balloon (1917, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) with the airlessness of Women’s Bath (1919, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). As he sought to “build a tower in which humanity can shriek out its rage and despair and all its poor hopes and joys and wild yearning,” Beckmann allowed his draftsmanship and composition to range in unexpected and startling ways.

Upstairs at Neue, the exhibition’s third floor explores this range in greater detail. Some of his portraits, for example the image of his wife from 1924 (Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich), reveal a Raphael-like softness. Yet even these elegant paintings convey a certain unease. Beckmann’s Portrait of Elsbet Götz (1924, Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus, Lübeck) depicts a young woman in a green dress in front of a red background, looking out with a reserved gaze. The backstory of this painting, described in the exhibition, contains its own horror. Götz met Beckmann through her brother, a student in art history who worked at the Städel-Museum in Frankfurt am Main as an assistant to the director Georg Swarzenski. She was a kindergarten teacher who founded her own school. Within a decade of sitting for this portrait, due to the rise of National Socialism, as a Jew, Götz was prohibited from teaching non-Jewish children. Despite worsening circumstances, she remained in Germany to care for her mother. In 1942 she was deported to Theresienstadt. In 1944 the Nazis shipped her to Auschwitz, where she was killed. “The figure situated in a warm red backdrop radiates a statuesque calm that testifies to her self-confidence and self-determination,” writes Peters of her resolve to stay in Germany, “thus giving the National Socialists the opportunity to murder Elsbet Götz.”

Even without the benefit of such hindsight, in Götz’s blank stare, her pursed lips, and her folded hands, Beckmann reveals the underlying anxiety of the Weimar years. Political uncertainty and economic upheaval undermined the sophistication of the age and ultimately gave way to graver terrors. The same goes for Paris Society (1925/1931/1947, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), one of the highlights of the exhibition, just to the left of these portraits. Beckmann worked on this assembly of figures multiple times over a twenty-year period, adding famous faces, such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre, along the way. And yet much is off-kilter in their interactions as they look in different directions, pushed together in unnatural proximity. This composition in circus-like colors tilts as though it were the last cocktail party on a sinking ship. Hidden in the lower-right corner, hand to head, Beckmann includes a profile of himself.

Max Beckmann, Self-portrait in front of Red Curtain, 1923, Oil on canvas, Private collection. © Artists Rights Society, New York.

Beckmann never abandoned pictorial depth. Instead he placed the content of compositions under ever greater pressure as he squeezed his figures together. “Most important for me is volume,” he said, “trapped in height and width.” In the confines of the picture frame, as he wrote in his “Creative Credo” of 1918–20, “I try to capture the terrible, thrilling monster of life’s vitality and to confine it, to beat it down and to strangle it with crystal-clear, razor-sharp lines and planes.” Far from seeking transcendence, “in my paintings I accused God of everything he has done wrong.”

The darkness of Beckmann’s vision is best seen in the drawings and suites of prints spread across Neue’s upper floor. Exceptional among these is his Hell portfolio of 1919 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Originally published in an edition of seventy-five signed copies by J. B. Neumann Verlag, Die Hölle depicts the chaotic scenes of the post-war city, where battles continued to rage over Germany’s future. On the cover Beckmann offers a grotesque self-portrait set in a frame. Beneath he includes a message written in script: “We ask the esteemed public to step up. It has the pleasant prospect of not being bored for perhaps ten minutes. Anyone who is not satisfied will have his money returned.”

Max Beckmann, “The Way Home” from the Hell portfolio, 1919, Lithograph, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Artists Rights Society

The carnivalesque invitation opens onto the hellscape of the German street, as figures are pushed and crushed in a stampede of images. Rifles and machine guns are fired into the crowds. Hungry children pray around a barren table. Prostitutes expose themselves by candlelight. Drunk veterans sing patriotic songs. In a final plate, titled The Family, Beckmann again depicts himself. As Beckmann points away, his child in a soldier’s helmet plays with toy grenades while his wife holds up her hands. The playacting must go to sleep.

Neumann published a thousand smaller lithographic booklets of this series, which were offered for two marks each, but not a copy was sold. The hell was all too real in inflationary Weimar. Nevertheless, the grotesqueries of the series, framed by Beckmann’s own self-image, helped inform the artist’s paintings in the 1920s. Repeatedly presenting himself in high-style reserve, Beckmann here becomes the elegant ringleader for his circus of Weimar excess. He looks directly out through tired eyes, often with cigarette in hand, in his Self-Portrait on Yellow Ground with Cigarette (1923, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Self-Portrait in Front of Red Curtain (1923, private collection), Self-Portrait with White Cap (1926, anonymous), and Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927, Harvard Art Museum).

Max Beckmann, Self-portrait with Cap, 1926, Oil on canvas, Private collection. © Artists Rights Society, New York.

Displayed alongside these self-portraits are Beckmann’s dense ensemble compositions, often arranged in a chaotic vertical format that takes time to absorb in full. Here the fun of his garishly colored beach scenes and carnival visions are cut through with dread. In The Trapeze (1923, Toledo Museum of Art), arms and legs have been twisted in a knot as a breast is seen falling out of its costume. In The Dream (1921, Saint Louis Art Museum), musicians have become tangled around their instruments as a figure with amputated hands embraces a fish. In The Bark (1926, private collection), passengers founder in an overloaded boat, while in Lido (1924, Saint Louis Museum) the swimmers seem to have been cut in two by the waves and their own jagged costumes.

Beckmann’s claims for a particular German art did not stop him from losing his teaching position in Frankfurt and being labeled a degenerate by the Nazi regime. In 1937 he went into self-imposed exile in the Netherlands where he tried to obtain an exit visa to emigrate to the United States. As he became trapped in Amsterdam for the next ten years, he painted his most well-known work—the haunting triptychs that merged his vertical formats with an increasingly enigmatic iconography to speak to his spiritual and physical isolation. It was only in 1947, three years before his death at age sixty-six, that Beckmann was able to move away, joining the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and teaching at Washington University and the Brooklyn Museum.

It is a loss for this focused show that we do not see something of Beckmann’s late work for which he is best known. It would also have been illuminating to include some examples of his younger production, such as his Sinking of the Titanic of 1912–13 or his Self-Portrait (Laughing) of 1910, which we only find in reproduction in the exhibition catalogue. If “Beckmann only achieved a unique artistic style because of the war,” as Olaf Peters writes, it helps to get some sense of what came before as well as a better appreciation of what is to come.

Max Beckmann, The Dream, 1921, Oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, © 2023 Artists Rights Society, New York. 

“It’s stupid to love humanity,” Beckmann said, “nothing but a heap of egoism (and we are a part of it too). But I love it anyway. I love its meanness, its banality, its dullness, its cheap contentment, and its oh-so-very-rare heroism.” In capturing what he called “transcendental objectivity,” which he saw as coming “out of a deep love for nature and humanity,” Beckmann displayed his own heroics. He fought for painting and won his victories on his own terms.

1.   “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on October 5, 2023, and remains on view through January 15, 2024.