Max Beckmann - Max Beckmann: On My Painting

Mayen Beckmann

Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows, wrote Beckmann to Stephan Lackner on 29 January 1938 when Lackner invited him to take part in an exhibition in Paris which, like the London exhibition in the New Burlington Galleries, aimed to show people outside Germany what the politics of Nazi Germany would no longer tolerate.

Political change had robbed Beckmann of his sphere of artistic activity in Germany. In 1937, after the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich with a programmatic speech given by Hitler and which toured Germany thereafter, circumstances became so threatening that Beckmann and his wife fled immediately to Holland. In Amsterdam they soon found a tiny flat with a large tobacco storeroom to use as a studio, where the figures of Beckmanns imagination henceforth met and thrust themselves onto canvas or paper.

Without any doubt, Beckmann did not believe that this place of passage would, for the next ten years, become his home and refuge and that all attempts to move on to France or America would be hindered at the last minute by the negative stance of those countries, and would then be thwarted by German troops marching into the Netherlands. For Beckmann, who since the 1920s had always stressed that he was a European rather than a German artist and whose artistic antecedents were the great painters of the European tradition, the unheated tobacco storeroom would for ten years become the sole space of freedom.

The text republished here is one of four programmatic speeches that Beckmann, scarcely able to speak English, gave in England and America: it is the first, and the longest and most fundamental. In the middle of his life he was 54 years old robbed of the network of dealers, museum directors, critics , collectors and friends, and living in a country where he could not speak the language, he was commissioned to examine the sources of his art using the spoken word. He was called upon to say which formal questions occupied him and how he responded to other stylistic innovations of the time such as Cubism, abstract painting or Surrealism.

Intellectual formulation was not his habit, neither as painter nor as an artist who expressed himself in words. So he wrote a speech, with long dashes to give the spoken rhythm, in which he addressed the full spectrum of his professional concerns, from sober description of life events and work processes, painterly technique and the importance of seeing, right through to his artistic vision. A figure comes into being in his speech, created by the artist, who sings a hymn to the images we see in his own pictures. William Blake appears to Beckmann in a dream and promises solace in the recognition of the beauty of creation in the higher spheres of perception.

In this moment Beckmann appears to decide in favour of sleeping and dreaming, like Kundry at the crossroads between good and evil, black and white, history and transcendence in Richard Wagners Parsifal. Put the picture away or, preferably, send it back to me, dear Valentin. If people cannot understand it based on their inner engagement with these matters , then there is no point in showing the thing at all. This comment, from a letter to his dealer Curt Valentin of 11 February 1938, reveals Beckmanns attitude to the language of explanation, only half a year before he wrote the text published in the present volume.

It almost seems that it was only when all established possibilities for expression were lost that Beckmann could attempt to convey in words what he would otherwise have painted.

Berlin, January 2003

Beckmann in his studio in Amsterdam 1938
Max Beckmann Archive, Berlin