The Prophet of Imprudence

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN

The Prophet of Imprudence.

A review of “The Politics of Prudence,” by Russell Kirk, Introduction by Michael P. Federici; Regnery Gateway, 314 pages, $19.99.

The early 1990s appeared to many in America as a moment of conservative ascendancy. Forty years had passed since Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, in 1953, a book that was originally titled The Conservative Rout. Now it was the progressives who were the ones seemingly being routed. Conservative pundits, publications, and foundations were pushing conservative policy in the onetime liberal redoubts of Washington and New York. Ronald Reagan had won an unprecedented forty-nine states to secure his reelection in 1984; his triumphant presidency paved the way for the election of his vice-president George H. W. Bush in 1992 and another four years of Republican administration. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher had reflected the spread of the conservative mind abroad. Meanwhile, and most astonishingly, the onetime colossus of the Soviet Union had lost its grip on Europe and had been vanquished—its ideological boot lifted from all but a few of the world’s backwaters and faculty lounges.

And yet, the thinker who had put the conservative mind in motion was not declaring victory. In 1993, a year before his death, Kirk published The Politics of Prudence. The collection of eighteen of his lectures given over five years—seventeen delivered at The Heritage Foundation, one at Hillsdale College—was more than a restatement of the moral imagination. It was also a conservative remonstrance to the movement that claimed its mantle. Thirty years on, Gateway Editions has now published a new edition of this collection that seems nothing if not prophetic. As the conservative mind is again on the defensive in America, or at the very least in a state of mental confusion, The Politics of Prudence suggests that no less than the imprudence of conservatives is much to blame for the latest rout. Thirty years ago, few conservatives wanted to hear such a message. Today it calls out as a testament to what went wrong and a corrective for what’s to come.

Conservatism, Kirk argued, is a “disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines,” as Michael P. Federici explains in this edition’s new introduction. “It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” The conservative mind, like the book The Conservative Mind, Federici continues, begins with Edmund Burke and the Burkean “opposition to the French Revolution and the rise of radical and revolutionary ideological movements that centralize power as a means to escape the limits of the human condition.”

In his opening chapter, Kirk lays into what he calls the “errors of ideology.” Quoting the American historian H. Stuart Hughes, Kirk writes, conservatism must be the “negation of ideology,” since “all ideologies work mischief.” An ideological false faith in “mystical Progress, with a Roman P” only leads to a “dubious Terrestrial Paradise…. that always, in reality, has turned out to be an Earthly Hell.” This “cult of progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old,” sends us on a “march toward Utopia,” where the “ideologue is merciless.” In the place of true faith, “Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy.” 

Absent such an ideology, the conservative must rely on prudence, one that is “judicious, cautious, sagacious,” Kirk explains. “Plato, and later, Burke, instruct us that in the statesman, prudence is the first of the virtues.” Since “‘conservatism’ possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata,” the prudential conservative instead looks to “custom, convention, continuity.” Disciplined in a “state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order,” the conservative understands “variety,” “imperfectability,” and “voluntary community.” A close link exists between “freedom and property,” and power is best retrained and decentralized in the pursuit of genuinely “prudent change.” It was just such “old restraints upon power,” Kirk reminds us, that the “French and Russian revolutionaries abolished,” and which progressives still pursue.   

Delivered late in life, The Politics of Prudence in part serves as a welcome restatement of The Conservative Mind of forty years prior and something of a summary of Kirk’s life work. We are reminded of The American Republic by Orestes Brownson, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and I’ll Take my Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition. Marcus Aurelius, Ambrose of Milan (“it has not pleased God that man should be saved through logic”), and G.K. Chesteron’s elevation of the “democracy of the dead” all make welcome appearances. T. S. Eliot, the subject of the final chapter in The Conservative Mind and a friend of Kirk’s, also returns here with the wisdom of his Notes towards the Definition of Culture: “one thing to ascertain is the limits of the plannable.” Further chapters reacquaint us with the German economist Wilhelm Röpke (“the age of immaturity, of restless experiment, of youth, has in our time become the object of the most preposterous overestimation”) and the British social critic Malcolm Muggeridge (“the enthronement of the gospel of progress necessarily required the final discrediting of the gospel of Christ”).

As the book continues, just like the lectures these chapters are based upon, what becomes apparent is that such reminders and restatements are also rebukes, intended not for progressive ideologues but for a self-professed conservative audience. In these later chapters, Kirk takes aim at what he sees as an emergent and dangerous conservative ideology, one based in populism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism. In the chapter “Popular Conservatism,” for example, Kirk shows little patience for the wisdom of the masses: “a Populist, whose basic conviction is that the cure for democracy is more democracy, conserves nothing.” 

Libertarianism gets an ever greater drubbing in the following chapter on “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians.” “They might oppose centralized power, but they are also doctrinaires, contemptuous of our inheritance from our ancestors,” Kirk writes, as well as being a “crowd of political fanatics who ‘license they mean, when they cry liberty.’” Theirs is an “ideology of universal selfishness—at a time when the country needs more than ever before men and women who stand ready to subordinate their private interests, if need be, to the defense of the Permanent Things.” Through its shortcomings, Kirk concludes, “libertarianism, properly understood, is as alien to real American conservatives as is communism.”

Beyond these tart assessments, it is Kirk’s subsequent chapter on “The Neoconservative: An Endangered Species” that remains the book’s most heated and controversial. Questioning the power at one point of a “Zionist minority,” Kirk goes on to state that “not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” At the time of its delivery, the historian Midge Decter labeled this remark a “bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives.” In hindsight, the quip was at best ill-chosen, as it isolated Kirk’s voice to the margins of the conservative conversation at the time while distracting from what we would now call his broader paleoconservative critique of neoconservative overreach, all coming at a time when it might have mattered most. 

As Kirk was that rare conservative opponent of the first Gulf War (“A war in Kuwait? A war for an oil-can”), we can only imagine what he might have said of the second. With the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the consequences of NAFTA, the housing meltdown, and the hollowing out of the American middle classes, in the years after his death, many of the concerns that Kirk expressed over neoconservatism have only come into higher relief. 

It wasn’t “Zionism” or allegiance to “Tel Aviv” that proved the neoconservative undoing but rather an unquestioning faith for many in “fanciful democratic globalism” and “democratic capitalism,” as Kirk goes on to write, which he calls a “bit of neoconservative cant.” This “New World Order,” Kirk warns, would lead to an “inhumane economy—bent upon maximum productive efficiency, but heedless of personal order and public order.” Such a concern with the “gross national product and with ‘global wealth’” blinded such conservatives, Kirk argues, to the “swelling growth of a dismal urban proletariat, and the decay of the moral order.” 

“You and I are in the death of the Marxist ideology,” Kirk concludes. As the Soviet Leviathan came to an end, he believed it must not be replaced with some American-made Colossus coming out of the “puerile infatuation of the neoconservatives with ‘a new ideology’ or an ‘American ideology.’”  “Soviet hegemony ought not to be succeeded by American hegemony,” he writes. “Mr. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ may make the United States detested—beginning with the Arab peoples—more than even the Soviet empire was…. Increasingly, the states of Europe and the Levant may suspect that in rejecting Russian domination, they exchanged King Log for King Stork.” At the fall of the Evil Empire, Kirk feared most a rising imprudence in its conservative American vanquishers. “America soon is going to wipe out everything else; and in the dazzling delirious joy of that consummation, forgetting to ask what will happen afterward.” 

In one of the book’s final chapters, “Prospects for the Proletariat,” Kirk takes stock of the consequences of the New World Order in the fate of Detroit. The city was once the “arsenal of democracy.” Now it was falling into abandonment and decay. Could we see here the true result of unquestioning “democratic capitalism”: the uprooting of labor, the slicing up of the city’s fabric through public housing and Federal highway bills? An entire book might be written on Kirk’s critique of the automobile, which he called the “mechanical Jacobin.” Would America’s Rust Belt be any better today without a quarter century of adventurism abroad and “free minds and free markets” at home? Conservatives, Kirk warns, must not fall prey to a “latter-day Utilitarianism.” Free of ideology, conservatives should instead nurture a nation’s culture and the “complex of convictions, folkways, habits, arts, crafts, economic methods, laws, morals, political structures, and all the ways of living in community that have developed over the centuries.” Anything less, we might say, would be imprudent.

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.