Theater of Cruelty (41 page)

Here he is, in 1907, a cocky young dandy in Florence, a cigarette, as always, dangling from his right hand; and here, in 1911, curling his lips at his critics in Berlin; and there, in 1917, baring his teeth in anger at the violence he had witnessed as a medical orderly in Flanders;
and there, in 1919, as the cynical boulevardier, nursing a glass of Sekt in a Frankfurt nightclub; or as a morbid clown in 1921, a tuxedoed grandee in 1927, a frightened exile in 1937, or a frail old man in a loud American shirt, the last completed just before he died in New York.

The poses and the clothes are the props of his changing existential circumstances, masks to be donned and discarded. The hands are as expressive as the faces: flopping about in the Frankfurt nightclub, open and vulnerable in his studio in 1921, carefully shaping a sculpture in Amsterdam. But they are always large, hammy things, as if to demonstrate the artist’s creative vigor. Only in a very late portrait (not shown in Paris), done in St. Louis, where he taught at the arts school in 1948, when he knew he was very ill, do the hands look strangely shrunken, swathed in a lady’s black gloves.

Beckmann was keen on fancy dress and circus performances, or indeed performances of any kind. He loved hanging around dance halls, frequently on his own, to watch the human masquerade. Life, in his paintings, is often depicted as a cabaret, though sometimes of a somewhat gruesome kind, with torturers as ringmasters and killers as clowns. A series of splendid prints of acrobats, dancers, and a female snake charmer, made in 1921, shows Beckmann on the title page, ringing a bell. “Circus Beckmann” reads the banner behind his head.

The point is not, I think, just to illustrate that all life is a stage. It is to show the true self behind the masks, the metaphysical self, that is, the one which, in Beckmann’s vision, transcends mere appearances, something Germans call
Innerlichkeit
, inwardness, which cannot easily be described in words. This didn’t stop Beckmann from trying. In his 1938 lecture at the New Burlington Galleries in London, he said, “Prior to existence a soul yearns to become a self. It is this self that I seek, in life as in art.” Perhaps this doesn’t get us much
further. It is easier to look at one of his self-portraits and sense what he means.

One of the most famous, painted in Frankfurt in 1927, is
Self-Portrait in Tuxedo
. Beckmann stands with his back to the window, with an aloof, rather haughty, almost scornful expression, very much the grand seigneur, one hand resting on his hip, the other holding a smoldering cigarette, as if to say: here I stand, I’ve arrived, I’m unassailable. The curtain behind him is brown, a favorite color that reminded him of fine cigars. But what gives this picture its extraordinary elegance is the contrast of black and white. The white shirt and white cigarette stand out against the black dinner jacket, and white light from the window splashes the hands and one side of the face, making it look a little sinister, like a moonlit skull.

Few painters—Manet comes to mind—applied black and white with such sensuality as Beckmann. But there was more to this than mere graphic effects. “Only in black and white,” he said in his London lecture, “can I see God as a unity, constantly recreating himself in a great terrestrial theatre performance.” God, in this case, is in Beckmann himself, God in a tuxedo.

In 1927, he was at the height of his social and artistic success. The self-portrait is a celebration of this. A “talent for self-publicity,” he said, was indispensable to an artistic career. He also said, on the same occasion, that “a budding genius” had to be taught to “respect money and power.” Cynicism was another one of Beckmann’s poses, like the clownish hats and the aristocratic dandyism. But like everything else about this enigmatic man, it was double-edged—playful and absolutely serious. He was convinced that artists should create a new metaphysical order. But it was essential “to achieve an
elegant
mastery of metaphysics.” And the artist, as high priest of the new order, should always be dressed in “a black suit, or, on festive occasions, in tails.”

The tension between Beckmann’s worldly and unworldly self, between his sensuality and his spiritual yearnings, his love of the world and his longing to be free from it, this is what gives his art its extraordinary power. This is the “true self” one sees behind the masks of his self-portraits. It also explains much of the symbolism in his paintings. Some images—the ubiquitous fish, the scenes of martyrdom and men falling, the phallic trumpets and spears, the large birds, like proto-angels—are borrowed from Greek myths, Christianity, Freud, and more esoteric sources, such as Kabbala and Gnosticism.

Following the Gnostics, Beckmann saw the world as a prison of lost souls, chained to sexual desires and violent impulses from which we should try to escape to a better, purer state beyond material creation—precisely what the old god, climbing the ladder, was offering the Argonauts in Beckmann’s last painting. Many of Beckmann’s paintings are in fact celebrations of sensuality, such as the gorgeous
Reclining Nude
(1929), on which he seems to have applied his creamy paint as though he were caressing the model’s curves. But sex is also shown as an expression of violence: women are tied up, men are bound in chains, great candles are dripping all over the place, and people are flayed, throttled, and hanged. Beckmann insisted that there was beauty in all this horror, a theme to which I shall return presently.

Apart from Cézanne, whom he admired for his creation of a painterly reality, Beckmann often mentioned Blake and the Douanier Rousseau (“Homer in a porter’s lodge”) as fellow visionaries who inspired him. But there is, of course, a long German tradition of metaphysical painting. The spiky figures in such pictures as
Descent from the Cross
(1917) remind one of Gothic art, as do the luminous blues and reds of his paintings in the 1940s, which are like stained-glass windows. Beckmann’s treatment of death and decay is reminiscent of Matthias Grünewald. And his depictions of man and the sea

bear some resemblance to the brooding seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich.

German Romanticism often teeters on the edge of morbid sentimentality, and sometimes falls right into it. What saves Beckmann’s art from sickliness, or the Gothic soft porn of such painters as Arnold Böcklin, is his realism. Although, unlike Grosz, he was not a satirist or a chronicler of his times, Beckmann’s scenes of violence and erotic power plays were closely observed, and his paintings of the 1910s and 1920s still have a firm sense of place. The drypoint pictures of carnage in World War I have the immediacy of delirious reportage.
The Grenade
(1915), showing soldiers being torn apart by a grenade attack, is as horrifying as anything by Goya.

Beckmann’s experiences at the front, which led to a nervous breakdown, radically changed the way he composed his images. As though real horror had made him a visionary of hell, people in the war pictures, but also in more allegorical paintings such as
The Crucifixion
(1917) or
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
(1917), are stretched and pulled across the canvas in strange, angular, tortured shapes. His friend the publisher Reinhard Piper remembers Beckmann saying that he wanted to use his pictures “to defy God.” He wanted his pictures to “accuse God of everything he had done wrong.”

But Beckmann also took an aesthetic delight in horror and mayhem. The wartime prints and paintings reveal quite starkly the tension between sensuality and repulsion that marks so much of Beckmann’s work. He wrote to his first wife, Minna, from the field hospital in Flanders: “I saw fantastic things. Half-clothed men streaming with blood, being bandaged in white down below in the half-light. Huge pain. New ideas of the flagellation of Christ.” This was typical of his unsentimental, even brutal way of seeing beauty in the worst human suffering, but also of his propensity to convert what he saw into allegory or myth.

Beckmann used Christian images to show the terrors of war, which sometimes contained recognizable characters, including the artist himself as Jesus Christ. He did something similar in later paintings, where he expressed the collective madness of Nazism, or the human slavery to violent passions, or the loneliness of exile, in Greek or Nordic myths. None of Beckmann’s paintings can be reduced to just one of these themes. Meaning is multilayered and the feelings expressed are always complex: horror and fascination, spirituality and earthiness, engagement in the world and detachment from it. This is why his pictures have a depth that Grosz, despite his great talent, rarely achieved in his work.

In the 1920s, a period of relative calm, personal happiness, and professional success, Beckmann is most down-to-earth. His paintings of Frankfurt contain fantastic elements: church spires that didn’t exist, factories in the wrong places, shapes of houses, bridges, and streetlamps blown up out of proportion. But this is still an observed world, most of which actually existed outside Beckmann’s own mind. Those people bathing at the Lido (1924) or dancing in Baden-Baden (1923) could well have been there, even if they were changed in Beckmann’s vision into helpless, almost somnambulistic figures, unaware of the catastrophes that lay in wait for them. The dancers, packed together inside the picture frame, look in danger of suffocating, if not from a lack of fresh air, then perhaps from boredom. The swimmers are falling backward, swept away by the surf, like playthings of violent nature.

It is in the 1930s, with Hitler’s rise, that Beckmann turns more and more to a world that existed entirely in his own mind, a world of myths and allegories mixed with the nightclub scenes and circus performances that continued to feed his imagination. By the time he was denounced by Hitler’s artistic arbiters as a degenerate artist in 1937, Beckmann was at the top of his powers. The triptych entitled
Temptation
(1936–1937) is a sadomasochistic phantasmagoria, featuring a murderous Nordic god, a sinister young liftboy in a Berlin hotel leading a crawling woman by a leash, a sexy blonde chained to a spear, a caged society woman cradling a fox and pecked by a diabolical bird, and a shackled man holding up a mirror to a voluptuous nude.

Here are Beckmann’s habitual themes: violence between men and women, sensual bondage in a world of evil. But they are put into the grisly contemporary setting of the Nazi state, where former liftboys really could have power, and Nordic gods came to represent sheer malevolence. In this painting, Beckmann found the perfect balance between reality and myth, in which the metaphysical looked real and reality resembled a fantasy. He was always after this effect of dreamlike realism, and was delighted when he saw it reflected in real life. On one of his solitary visits to an Amsterdam dance hall just after the war, he suddenly spotted Cary Grant. At first, he noted in his diary, “I thought it was a scene in a movie. Strangely unreal.”

Beckmann’s paintings of sexual violence are never pretty, of course. He criticized Picasso and Matisse for making their art too decorative, too much like beautiful wallpaper. Not enough German
Innerlichkeit
, perhaps. But whereas Picasso could in fact be brutally aggressive in his paintings of women, Beckmann’s women always look seductive. Sex is never disgusting, as it is in paintings by some of his German contemporaries (Otto Dix, say). He seems to be saying that if sex, and women, were not so beguiling, we would not feel so enslaved by our desires.

The day after Hitler’s radio speech about degenerate art, on July 18, 1937, Beckmann packed his bags and moved to Amsterdam with his second wife, Quappi, never to return to Germany. His state of mind as an artistic refugee (Beckmann was neither Jewish nor overtly political) is beautifully revealed in his self-portraits of that time. One
of them, ironically entitled
Released
, shows him in chains, his ashen face a portrait of despair. On his left shoulder you can just make out the word “Amerika,” the Beckmanns’ actual destination before they got stuck in Amsterdam. A self-portrait painted in 1938 is one of his most beautiful. The horn, a favorite symbol of art and sexual power, is reversed and held to his ear, like a huge ear trumpet. Beckmann is dressed in what looks like a striped dressing gown but could also be a convict’s uniform. In exile, he retreated into his studio on the first floor of a tobacco warehouse, the horn his symbolic receptacle of news from the monstrous world outside.

One of the peculiar things about Beckmann’s paintings in Amsterdam, where he lived until he finally left for America in 1947, is that so few of them show anything of the city itself. Many are of Beckmann’s singular imaginary world of myths and symbols. Others are created from memory:
Dream of Monte Carlo
(1940), for example, a nightmare gambling casino in sickly yellows and greens, filled with demonic gamblers, sluttish women, and masked men about to release bombs. Others still are claustrophobic theater scenes full of personal terrors. In the middle of a triptych,
The Actors
(1941–1942), Beckmann himself appears, wearing a crown and stabbing himself in the chest with a sword.

As a German artist in a provincial capital under German occupation, Beckmann was almost totally isolated. The Dutch took little notice of him, and the Nazis could only regard this “degenerate” artist with the deepest distrust. Other German exiles, in similar circumstances, committed suicide or lapsed into a state of depressive inertia. Not Beckmann. He painted, and painted, and painted. The fact that he had never been a joiner was surely a help.

Beckmann despised any collective activity. For a time, in the 1910s, he was a member of the Berlin Secession, but soon quit after disagreements with his fellow artists. “The sportsmaniac is the soul
of the collective man,” he wrote in 1925. When asked, in 1928, what he felt about politics, he answered: