Brown in Town

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2024

Brown in Town

On the Winter Show, Master Drawings New York, “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club” & “Masters Week.”

In late January, The Winter Antiques Show returned to the Park Avenue Armory. Correction: make that “The Winter Show.”1 Five years ago, as this venerable exposition fell under new management on its sixty-fifth anniversary year, the word “antiques” was struck from its title. Like that brown furniture in your grandmother’s attic now scented with camphor and racism, the past has lost its market value to the present. Against the mystery cult of the new, who dares to appear antique?

And so, much of The Winter Show in recent years has felt like Terminal D Duty Free. Aisles of bangles, baubles, and beads make the presentation an ahistorical muddle. Maybe this is the point. How better to get “younger collectors interested in material culture at large,” in the words of expo leadership, at the Young Collectors Night DJ party? Fortunately, it has not all been out with the old and in with the new for what remains arguably America’s most important antiques fair. Now seventy years old, The Winter Show’s ten-day assembly of dealers should be seen as an heirloom event—one dedicated to benefiting the East Side House Settlement, now in the South Bronx, as it has since the fair’s founding in the 1950s.

John Vanderlyn Jr., Santa Claus, 1845, Oil on canvas, Jeffrey Tillou Antiques, New York.

Beyond the gewgaws, this year’s Winter Show presented a welcome homage to its own past. Mixed in among the booths of some seventy dealers, an exhibition titled “Focus: Americana,” curated by Alexandra Kirtley of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, brought together pieces from several of the show’s historical exhibitors, some of whom still participate, and others who left long ago. Taken together, this fascinating assembly spoke to the importance of The Winter Show in raising the profile of American antiques over its seven-decade run and made the case for their value today.

Highlights here were many, including a tall case clock by Major Timothy Chandler, circa 1810, along with a fire screen “with framed theorem still life,” circa 1830, both on view from David A. Schorsch–Eileen M. Smiles Fine Americana. Olde Hope offered up a pine overmantel panel with a vernacular painting of a white house from New York or New England circa 1820–40. Levy Galleries brought a Hepplewhite mirror with an original floral finial and an eglomise-gilded panel of a farm landscape, made in New York circa 1795. Jeffrey Tillou Antiques presented a portrait of Santa Claus “painted in 1845 by John Vanderlyn for the cabin on the river steamer Santa Claus—owned by Ezra Fitch,” according to a label on its verso. Allan Katz Americana brought a whirligig of a New York Seventy-ninth Infantry Regiment Highlander in tartan parade attire, the only known such carving in existence, from circa 1860–80. Meanwhile Kelly Kinzle Antiques presented “Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775,” a decorated powder horn attributed to the Simsbury Carver. Also from Kinzle was a miniature wall clock of mahogany and painted glass signed by David Brown, circa 1820, and a harvest face-jug by Charles Decker—an expressionist example of Tennessee’s Keystone Potter circa 1875. Altogether, the presentation of “Focus: Americana” revealed the wonder and strangeness of American craft, with pieces that rose to the level of fine art while retaining their folk traditions.

Simsbury Carver, Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775, 1775, Horn, Killy Kinzle Antiques, New Oxford, Pennsylvania.

With fewer collectors deeply invested in historical periods and styles, the hope today is that buyers will at least view such antiques as stand-alone works that can be mixed into more contemporary, Instagrammable settings. As with “Focus: Americana,” it was reassuring to see two current dealers dedicated to colonial, British, and American antiques flanking the show’s entrance. On one side, Cove Landing presented a George I “Mulberry Wood’’ bureau cabinet, circa 1725, with a mottled veneer that would put an abstract expressionist to shame. Meanwhile, across the entry hallway, Levy Galleries displayed a Chippendale tall case clock, circa 1770, next to a Federal eagle-inlaid tall case clock, circa 1800. Inside the booth, a Federal table attributed to the workshop of Thomas Seymour, circa 1805–12, spoke to the increasing interest in furniture designed for “lady’s work.”

Hirschl & Adler Galleries brought its own worktable “in the Sheraton Taste,” circa 1810, attributed to Thomas Seymour, with a similarly suspended fabric workbag for yarn and linen. This piece was paired with a burled-elm pier table with tole columns, circa 1815–19, along with paintings and watercolors by Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper. Nearby, Daniel Crouch Rare Books displayed John Mitchell’s fascinating Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, published in 1755, along with other cartographic curios, including the Adrian Naftalin collection of maps of the—checks notes—Jewish Holy Land.

Pierre Bonnard, L’Escalier, ca. 1932, Oil & gouache on paper, Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York.

Rounding out these attractions was a pair of George III reverse-glass cabinets featuring Grand Tour vignettes, circa 1780, attributed to Ince and Mayhew, from Hyde Park Antiques; a sixteenth-century bowl with a painting of John the Baptist by Pontormo at Robert Simon Fine Art; a stag hunt by John Wootton and other sporting scenes at Red Fox Fine Art; fifteenth-century books at Les Enluminures; a circa 1932 oil-and-gouache of a pet dog by Pierre Bonnard at Jill Newhouse Gallery; and artifacts by Northwest Coast Indians at Tambaran Gallery. Such a collection of historical objects is almost enough to make you forget our present circumstances.

The Winter Show serves as a pendant to New York’s annual auctions for historical art and antiques, which take place the following week. Squeezed between the two is Master Drawings New York, an initiative that brings national and international galleries to the Upper East Side, where they partner with local venues for wall space.2 Now in its eighteenth season, this year Master Drawings New York came under the leadership of Christopher Bishop, a New York gallerist with an eye for misattributed work. Employing a similar sense of connoisseurship to this undervalued gathering of galleries and collectors, Bishop introduced a new level of organization and scholarship to the endeavor that presented a welcome abundance of work in seemingly every available corner of the neighborhood—with only a few days to see it all.

Lorenzo Balidessera Tiepolo, A Young Man Wearing a Studio Cap, Resting His Head on His Left Hand, ca. 1755, Black & red chalk, Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., New York.

Clustered in galleries around the Metropolitan Museum and continuing down to Sixty-fourth Street, twenty-six exhibitors mounted these special exhibitions of works on paper from the fifteenth century to the present. Highlights this year included, at Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., a portrait of the young Henry William Mathew by John Flaxman, dynamic studies by Il Guercino, drawings by Boucher and Corot, and an unpublished drawing by Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo. Abbott and Holder brought over forty-eight British works on paper from its London-based showroom, including a capriccio landscape by Robert Adam, a visionary bedroom sketch by William Blake, and a delicate J. M. W. Turner watercolor once owned by John Ruskin—along with a handsome printed catalogue. Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings presented orientalist portraits by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Leopold Carl Müller alongside an exhibition of portraits and seascapes by the Spanish master Joaquín Sorolla. Meanwhile David Nolan Gallery, in collaboration with Donald Ellis, presented “Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900,” an exhibition of seventy-five sketches by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota artists from the nineteenth century.

The book trade remains a welcome gateway to the cultures of the past, with much of it accessible to a range of readers and collectors. Judging by the crowds at recent New York book fairs, the hard copy has become only more attractive in our digital world for its tactile pleasures and literary delights, while providing the ultimate backup to our evanescent bits and bytes. As collecting institutions have become radicalized by identity politics (see “A library by the book,” my essay in The New Criterion of December 2022), personal libraries are more essential than ever before.

Cover, spine & back cover of The Whole Book of Psalmes, 1643. Photo: Nicole Neenan / Grolier Club.

Last September, the upstart Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair set up shop for the first time inside St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. The show was a welcome competitor to the more established (and woker) International Antiquarian Book Fair, put on every April by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. An extra pleasure of its ecclesiastical venue was hearing Paolo Bordignon, St. Bart’s organist and choirmaster, perform on the fair’s opening night.

This season, just up the street, the Grolier Club, America’s oldest society of bibliophiles, founded in 1884, continued its run of significant public programs with two must-see exhibitions on view at once. “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” installed in the second floor gallery, was a page-turner.3 With more than ninety books from the Grolier member Jeffrey Johnson’s collection of early detective novels, the exhibition featured standouts ranging from the first American edition of Memoirs of Vidocq (1834), to the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (1892), to Agatha Christie’s first novel (1920). Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Anna Katherine Green were among the list of accomplices in a thrilling show that was criminal to miss. Especially appreciated was Johnson’s own testimony, provided in wall labels, of his discoveries as a collector.

A gallery view of “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” at the Grolier Club, New York. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.

Meanwhile, on view through April in the club’s main exhibition hall, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020,” reveals the Grolier’s advancement of bookbinding as both collecting interest and craft.4 Thanks to the creation of the society’s own bindery in the late nineteenth century, for example, club members no longer had to send their rare books off to France for treatment. Drawing on the society’s holdings, the exhibition pairs the club’s own work with a hundred examples of rare bindings, starting with a circa 1473 brass-and-pigskin volume of The Jewish Wars by Josephus and Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, through a jeweled miniature Whole Booke of Psalmes (1673), on up to a gilded freehand design by Ulrich Widmann from 2019. Most rewarding are those bindings that speak to the contents within, for example, Ernest Lefébure’s Embroidery and Lace of 1888, with boards covered in green ribbed silk embroidered in delicate floral patterns.

To cap off the antiques season, in late January Sotheby’s filled out its multiple floors on York Avenue with its “Masters Week” sales.5 These days, works by, or of, non-whites and non-men are the hot commodities. Institutional buyers must pursue “diversity” or risk dei ire. That explains the run-up in prices for the saccharine paintings of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who has been achieving records at auction for her work as a female Old Master (Old Mistress?). At the same time, institutions must be seen delivering up their permanent collections to the deaccessioning of the vanities. In the latest Sotheby’s sales, the Metropolitan Museum offered paintings from its “permanent” collection by George Romney, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Raeburn, and Johann Liss. With proceeds meant to “benefit the acquisition fund,” we might assume those returns will not be used to purchase more Romneys, Reynoldses, and Gainsboroughs.

Gustav Bauernfeind, The Western Wall, ca. 1890, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

Nevertheless, it may be good to get such art into the hands of collectors who will value it, and it is a pleasure to see these works as they go up for sale. In the February 1 auction titled “Master Paintings & Sculpture Part I,” The Western Wall (ca. 1890), a painting by Gustav Bauernfeind, bore detailed witness to the historical importance of that holy site. Equally interesting was a charming Swabian School altarpiece of Saint Ursula, circa 1480–90, which at one time passed through the hands of the Monuments Men, who restituted the work from the clutches of Hermann Göring. In “Master Paintings Part II,” a Veronese oil of the creation of Eve, circa 1570–80, sold off by the Art Institute of Chicago after nearly a century in its collection, could have been yours for the price of New York’s worst studio apartment. In the February 2 sale of “Old Master and British Works on Paper,” a sketchbook drawing of a bridge near Epsom by John Constable, circa 1806, was estimated at $5–8,000 but ended up selling for much more. Meanwhile, the sale of “Master Sculpture & Works of Art” remained particularly undervalued, with fourteenth-century ecclesiastical French sculpture going for four digits.

In fact, it is worth noting that the highest jump of Masters Week was the sale of six gym shoes once worn by Michael Jordan. As that suite of sneakers sold for eight million dollars, no Old Master can hope to be like Mike.

1.   The Winter Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 19 through January 28, 2024.

2.   Master Drawings New York was on view from January 27 through February 3, 2024.

3.   “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” was on view at the Grolier Club, New York, from November 30, 2023, through February 10, 2024.

4.   “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020” opened at the Grolier Club, New York, on January 17 and remains on view through April 13, 2024.

5.   “Masters Week” was on view at Sotheby’s, New York, from January 26 through February 3, 2024.

Giorgione in the House

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2024

Giorgione in the house

On “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, New York.

The arrival of a single painting in the United States is not often cause for a special exhibition. When the visitor, however, is a work by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (ca. 1477–1510), you make an exception. Only about ten paintings are attributed today to the enigmatic Venetian, and The Three Philosophers (ca. 1508–09), now on loan in New York for the first time from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is among his greatest achievements. So the appearance of this canvas at the Frick Collection’s temporary home of Frick Madison is cause for a very special exhibition indeed. That this painting has been reunited—for the first time in some four hundred years—with its pendant composition, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80), the masterpiece from the Frick’s own collection that in the sixteenth century occupied the same Venetian palazzo as the Giorgione, is also cause for jubilation. This reunion is the occasion for a revelatory one-room show, “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.”1

The loan is the result of a pursuit that bordered on obsession for Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. The exhibition is also a tribute to the Frick’s outgoing director, Ian Wardropper, who has set his retirement for next year, and his high-minded use of the collection’s temporary digs on Madison Avenue—the former home of the Whitney Museum, onetime outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, and future headquarters of Sotheby’s auction house. On March 3, the Frick will vacate these galleries that have functioned like private viewing rooms for its collection and move back to its mansion at One East Seventieth Street.

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

The installation of the Frick’s permanent collection on Madison Avenue—and in particular the presentation of St. Francis—was the inspiration for Salomon’s dream of reuniting the Bellini with the Giorgione. To underscore the worthiness of the unprecedented loan, in the accompanying catalogue published by D Giles Limited, Salomon collects everything we could possibly imagine about the creation, meaning, and provenance of The Three Philosophers and its relationship with St. Francis in the Desert.

Three years ago, I wrote about the effect of seeing St. Francis in the Desert in the light of Frick Madison (see “Sublet with Bellini” in The New Criterion of April 2021). A raking illumination fills the scene from beyond the left frame—unseen by us, but fully apparent to Francis, who exposes the symbolic wounds of the stigmata on his hands and feet. Flora and fauna fill this vision of his rocky hermitage as the rays seemingly melt its icelike outcropping into a stream, watering a kingfisher below. Kenneth Clark noted how “no other great painting, perhaps, contains such a quantity of natural details observed and rendered with incredible patience: for no other painter has been able to give to such an accumulation the unity which is only achieved by love.”

Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, ca. 1508–09, Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: KMH-Museumsverband.

At Frick Madison, positioned in its own alcove, the painting has been lit by one of Marcel Breuer’s trapezoidal windows in a way that accentuates the work’s own luminous dynamics. Light and shadow, depiction and reality glow together. The Three Philosophers has now been hung on this alcove’s opposite wall, which had been left empty before the arrival of the Giorgione. Again we are presented with figures in a rocky landscape, this time three men in colorful robes, with two standing and one seated. The similarities in these compositions of roughly equal size are striking, especially as the two paintings can now be observed together. The hills in the distance share uncanny form, as do the designs of the distant towns with their arched construction. The stepped stones in the foregrounds seem like mirror formations. Even the tiny pebbles appear to have been quarried from the same source.

The two paintings interact the more you move around them and take them in. Are we looking at the same scene depicting two different periods of time? Or are these two sides of the same outcropping, with the stone floor of Frick Madison now running between them? While the direct lighting of St. Francis leaves little doubt of its divine origin, the illumination of the Giorgione is more elusive. A sun low on the horizon seems to be setting, but the figures appear to be lit with an unexplained glow. Those “three philosophers” may be seen carrying scientific instruments and tablets relating to the sun and moon, but the lighting of the composition is non-Euclidian and otherworldly. It is almost as if the radiance of the Bellini is now bouncing off of the Giorgione in mystical, lunar-like reflection.

Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca. 1475–80, Oil on panel, Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

As is often the case with Giorgione, the more we look into this young painter’s work, the less we understand it. Anyone who has tracked down Giorgione’s small painting The Tempest (ca. 1508) in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia can likewise attest to the mystery of that strange and tender scene of a nursing mother, an idle man, and ruined architecture beneath a stormy sky. Who are they? Where are we? What are we seeing? The questions strike like a thunderclap emanating from the clouds above. Here is something more than just visual storytelling with known characters and stock symbols. Rather it is something absorptive, mysterious, and new.

The same goes for The Three Philosophers. The composition has warmed observers with its brilliance but also baffled scholars about its meaning since just about the time of its own creation. In 1525 a Venetian collector by the name of Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552) was making a survey of art in the Veneto when he recorded a definitive account of these paintings together in what he titled his Pittori e pitture in diversi luoghi (Painters and paintings in different places). This manuscript was later published as his Notizia d’opere di disegno (Information on works of design).

In his account of the paintings “in the house of Messer Taddeo Contarini,” written in the Venetian dialect, Michiel lists ten works. One of them is “three philosophers,” he writes, a “canvas in oil of the three philosophers in the landscape, two standing and one seated who is contemplating the sun’s rays, with that stone finished so marvelously . . . begun by Giorgio from Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano Veneziano.” Another is a “Panel of St. Francis in the Desert,” which Marcantonio Michiel identifies as an oil by “Zuan Bellini, begun by him for Messer Zuan Michiel, and it has a landscape nearby wonderfully finished and refined.”

Installation view of “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini.” Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

Marcantonio Michiel’s account is significant for several reasons: for coining the titles of the two works (3 phylosophi and S. Francesco nel diserto); for its clear descriptions of the paintings (dui ritti et uno sentado che contempla gli raggii solari cum quel saxo finto cusi mirabilmente and un paese propinquo finito et ricercato mirabilmente); for information about their authorship and provenance (Fu cominciata da Zorzo da Castel Franco, et finita da Sebastiano Venitiano and Fu opera de Zuan bellino, cominciata da lui a Ms. Zuan michiel); and for describing them together in one private collection (In casa de Ms. Tadio Contarino).

Recorded some forty-five years after the creation of St. Francis, seventeen years after Three Philosophers, fifteen years after Giorgione’s death, and nine years after the death of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1424/35–1516), Michiel’s survey is also revelatory for what it leaves out: the identity of those three philosophers, as well as the particular moment depicted in Saint Francis of Assisi’s life. Both have been sources of discussion and conjecture ever since. For St. Francis, most scholars now agree that the image depicts the saint’s stigmatization, not in the “desert” but rather at his Apennine retreat at La Verna. Still, two standard references are missing: the seraph delivering Christ’s wounds, and Brother Leo. An alternative interpretation is that we are rather presented with Francis composing his Canticle of the Creatures, that prayer to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Bodily Death.”

The Giorgione poses an even greater conundrum. “Apart from Giorgione’s Tempest,” writes Salomon in his exhibition catalogue, “very few Venetian Renaissance works have received as much attention and been as widely interpreted as The Three Philosophers.” The identification of those “three philosophers,” which was left unstated by Marcantonio Michiel even within two decades of its execution, has resulted in centuries of conjecture. Assuming the painting in fact depicts “three philosophers” from antiquity, the proposed combinations as collected by Salomon have included the following: Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras; Aristotle, Averroes, and Virgil; Regiomontanus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy; Ptolemy, Al-Battani, and Copernicus; Aristotle, Averroes, and a humanist; and Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Alternatively, the figures might represent the Three Magi; or Marcus Aurelius studying with two philosophers on the Caelian Hill; or Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians; or Evander and Pallas showing Aeneas the Capitoline Hill; or a meeting between Sultan Mehmet II and Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios in Constantinople; or Saint Luke, King David, and Saint Jerome; or King Solomon, King Hiram of Tyre, and the master craftsman Hiram of Tyre as they plan the Temple in Jerusalem; or perhaps even the painters Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Giorgione. For Xavier Salomon, the most convincing identification, as proposed by the scholar Karin Zeleny, is that of Pythagoras with his two teachers, Thales of Miletus and Pherecydes of Syros, “the first three philosophers of the Western tradition shown while at the Oracle of Apollo at Didyma.” I am more partial to the poetic approach proposed by the art historian Tom Nichols in his book Giorgione’s Ambiguity, in which he suggests that our interpretation is meant to remain free-floating and open-ended. Deliberate ambiguities, he writes, are Giorgione’s “visual traps set to capture the viewer’s curiosity and speculation.”

“Uncertain about authorship, patronage, dating, and the significance of both paintings,” writes Salomon, “when it comes to Giorgione’s Three Philosophers and Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, we know much less than we think we do.” What is certain is that these paintings occupied the same Venetian home soon after their creation, even if the specific location of Taddeo Contarini’s residence in the neighborhood of Cannaregio has been up for debate. Marcantonio Michiel writes that Bellini painted his St. Francis for Zuan Michiel, and the painting was then acquired by Taddeo Contarini (ca. 1466–1540) soon thereafter. It is possible that Giorgione’s Three Philosophers was a direct commission by this powerful and supposedly unscrupulous Venetian merchant—one even intended to complement the Bellini. While he may or may not have painted it for Contarini’s collection specifically, Giorgione most likely studied with Bellini, and so St. Francis might still have been front and center in his mind.

The last time these paintings were seen in one place was between 1556 and 1636. Like a flash of light of some divine rapture, their being brought together in this spectacular exhibition makes their connections manifest once again.

1.   “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” opened at Frick Madison, New York, on November 9, 2023, and remains on view through February 4, 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.