Acknowledged as one of its "greatest masters," Max Beckmann (1884-1950) saw both the best and the worst of a century once called, without irony, "The Century of Progress." Early in his career he saw himself as a traditionalist. Decrying abstract tendencies in art, he concentrated on portraits and contemporary history painting. His personal experiences of World War I, however, changed all that. His canvases took on sometimes frightening psychological overtones.

Yet he was never without hope: he began to see the artist not merely as a picture maker, but as one who played a central role in political life. The artist, he believed, was the state's chief architect. But then that, too, changed. One day at the summit of his profession, the next he heard himself ridiculed as an "art dwarf."

One day a respected and highly influential professor of art in Frankfurt, the next he found himself a man with no job and no status. One day working in the security of anonymity, the next he was an exile, fleeing for his life. The King (cover) can be considered a record of those years. The first version of The King was completed in 1933. In that version the king is a self-portrait of the artist, and the woman at the left is the image of "Quappi," his second wife. The artist, as king, represents the soul of man and rules over the subordinate world of matter.

Then, on July 18,1937, while living in Berlin in what he had hoped was anonymity, Beckmann realized that he was one of the artists Hitler was denouncing that very evening in a radio broadcast. He fled the next day to Amsterdam. Shortly thereafter he revised The King. Some elements were painted out, the relationship of the figures to each other was changed, and the color harmonies became acerbic. The posture of the king became more open and more vulnerable. Quappi, once sitting in front of the king, was now placed beside him, with her arm over the king's thigh in a protective gesture; the mysterious shrouded woman at the right, in the first version looking full face at the viewer, is now seen in profile, her head inclined.slightly toward the king in a gesture of concern, or perhaps even remonstrance. The palm of her left hand faces outward, warning the onlooker or warding off imminent danger. Once set back into the depth of a space defined by a (painted-out) pillar at the right edge, the figures are now pushed far forward, thereby losing the protection of any distance there once might have been between subject and spectator. The colors set one's teeth on edge: acid orange, shrill violet, midnight blue, ochre, olive. The flesh tones are brassy, hardly distinguishable from the king's barbed crown.

The greatest departure from the original version, however, is the treatment of the king's eyes. In the original version they looked directly outward at the viewer, calmly, as did also those of Quappi and the shrouded woman. In the case of the king, Beckmann has now painted them out, deliberately blinding the self-portrait of himself as artist. It is as though he were Oedipus putting out his own eyes as penance for his sin, however unwittingly it may have been committed. Where once he saw the artist as architect of the political order, Beckmann now sees himself disastrously mistaken. Like Oedipus, he thought he saw, but what he saw was not reality.

The truth was quite different. For that figurative blindness Oedipus had to live the rest of his life literally blind. That Beckmann perhaps saw himself culpable, a failure in his artistic mission, is hinted at in a lecture he gave in London only months after fleeing Berlin: "I have passed blindly," he said, "many things which belong to real and political life." Where once he had seen the artist as one whose task-even justification for existence-is to "give to people a sign of their fate," Beckmann is now, like his Greek counterpart, only a blind king. What Beckmann did not say, however, is that sometimes it is only when the artist is no longer distracted by the visible tumult around him that he really begins to see: witness another mythological figure, the blind seer

Teresias. Beckmann's later work, embodying his favorite motifs of the circus and the trapeze artist (JAMA cover, January 10, 1996), became more symbolic. Leaving the prophesying of social and political matters to others, he turned more inward, looking at and concentrating on the universal theme of the struggle of spirit and matter in the human person. "What I want to show in my work," he said, "is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality," what he called the "fourth dimension" his being so desperately was seeking.

One of his last works, completed shortly before he died in 1950, embodied these concepts in a portrait (JAMA cover, October 9, 1996) of himself in a blue jacket, puffing on a cigarette: "The mythological crown has been discarded," said one commentator"... [the artist] stands before us as a human being." (Stephan Lackner, 1977; quoted by Charles Werner Haxthausen in Modern German Masterpieces. The Saint Louis Art Museum. Winter Bulletin, 1985, p 31).

Beckmann never returned to Germany. At the end he was still an exile, but he was again a respected professor of art, first at Washington University in St Louis, and at the time of his death, at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art. Throughout his life, whatever the circumstances, his work remained true to his deepest, fundamental beliefs, whether these be expressed in shipwrecks, city scenes, religious scenes, self-portraits, still-life, nudes, circus performers, or even mythology, such as his revised version of The King.

More critiques:

http://www.artchive.com/galleries/beckmann/beckmann.html

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2003-08.html