Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann
Fastnacht (Carnival)
1920
oil on canvas
Tate Modern, London

 

Max Beckmann
Women's Bath
1922
drypoint
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Max Beckmann
Portrait of composer Frederick Delius
1922
lithograph
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Max Beckmann
Portrait of Frau H.M.
1923
woodcut
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Max Beckmann
Youth with Lobster
1926
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Portrait of Marie Swarzenski
ca. 1927
pastel on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Paris Society
1931
oil on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Max Beckmann
The Murder
1933
watercolor and ink on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Two Women Reading
ca. 1937-38
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Self Portrait
1938
gouache on paper
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Max Beckmann
Woman reading at the Beach
1939
oil on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Max Beckmann
Faust Sleeping
1943-44
drawing
(print study for book illustration)
Goethe Haus, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
The Murder
1945
watercolor and ink on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Self Portrait
1946
lithograph
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Models
1947
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Max Beckmann
Baccarat
1947
oil on canvas
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Max Beckmann
Portrait of Wally Barker
1948
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum

Max Beckmann
Large Still Life with Pigeons
1950
oil on canvas
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

from Afterword

I hadn't moved. I felt the desert

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)

on all sides, shifting as I speak,

so that I was constantly

face-to-face with blankness, that

stepchild of the sublime,

which, it turns out,

has been both my subject and my medium.

What would my twin have said, had my thoughts

reached him?

Perhaps he would have said

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)

after which I would have been

referred to religion, the cemetery where

questions of faith are answered.

– Louise Glück (2014)

Visual Relics (1825-1850)

George Richmond
The Fatal Bellman
1827
engraving
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Richard Parkes Bonington
Doge's Palace, Venice
1826
oil on board
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Small Bather
1826
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Jonas Welch Holman
Man with a Pen
ca. 1827
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Isaac Cruikshank
Cricket Grounds at Darnall, Sheffield, Yorkshire
ca. 1827
drawing (print study)
British Museum

Peter De Wint
Study for The Ferry
after 1829
watercolor
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Robert Walter Weir
The Poet's Dream
ca. 1830
watercolor
Detroit Institute of Arts

Joseph Anton Koch
Hylas seized by the Nymphs
1832
oil on canvas
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Eugène Delacroix
Blacksmith
1833
etching and aquatint
Milwaukee Art Museum

Christen Købke
Académie
1839
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Robert or Mary Smirke
Wooded Scene with Couple lying under a Tree
(illustration to Shakespeare)
before 1845
watercolor and gouache
Yale Center for British Art

Eugène Delacroix
Path on the Side of a Mountain, Eaux-Bonnes, Pyrénées
1845
watercolor
(formerly owned by Edgar Degas)
Yale University Art Gallery

Ary Scheffer
Christ the Comforter
ca. 1847
oil on canvas
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Rembrandt Peale
Pearl of Grief
1848
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum

Alfred Rethel
Death as a Friend
(series, Dance of Death)
1850
woodcut
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Paul Gavarni
Parisian Couple in Carnival Dress
Relieving Themselves
ca. 1850
gouache on paper
Princeton University Art Museum

What god, o Muses, fended off such fierce

fires from the Teucrians? Who saved their ships

from such a blazing conflagration? Tell me.

For that which makes us trust the tale is old,

and yet the story's fame is everlasting.

When he prepared to seek high seas, Aeneas

first built his fleet in Phrygian Ida; then

the Berecynthian herself, the mother

of gods, is said to have addressed these words

to mighty Jove: "My son, now you have won

Olympus, listen to my prayer, grant

what your dear mother asks. I had a forest

of pine, which I had loved for many years,

upon my mountain's summit, where men brought

their offerings to me; here, shadowed, stood

a grove of black pitch trees and trunks of maples.

I gave these gladly to the Dardan chief

when he had need to build a fleet. But anxious

fear now torments my troubled breast. Free me

of dread and answer this, a mother's prayer:

that in their journeying no wave or whirlwind

may ever tear these timbers; let it be

a help to them that they grew on my mountain."

Her son, who turns the constellations, answered:

"Why, Mother, have you called upon the Fates?

What are you asking for your favorites?

That hulls made by the hands of mortals should

have the immortals' privilege? And that

Aeneas may pass, sure, through unsure dangers?

What god commands that power? Nonetheless,

when they have fulfilled their tasks and reached their end

of journeying, the harbors of Ausonia, 

then all that have escaped the waves and carried

the Dardan leader to Laurentum's lands

are saved: I shall strip off their mortal form;

I shall command those galleys to take on

the shapes of goddesses of the great waters,

even as are the Nereids, Galatea

and Doto, whose breasts cut the foaming sea."

He spoke and by his Stygian brother's waters,

by riverbanks that seethe with pitch, a black

and whirling vortex, nodded his assent,

and with his nod made all Olympus shudder.

– why Turnus proves unable to burn the Trojan ships, from Book IX of Virgil's Aeneid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (1971)

Visual Relics (1937-1939)

Lucien Aigner
Bastille Day
1937
gelatin silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Coronation of King George VI, London
1937
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

Cecil Beaton
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor
at Château de Cande
1937
gelatin silver print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Acme Newspictures
Hindenburg Crash
1937
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

Léonard Misonne
Le Chemin Creux
1937
mediobrome print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Berenice Abbott
Jacob Heymann Butcher Shop, 345 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan
1938
gelatin silver print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Walker Evans
Subway Portrait
ca. 1938
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art

György Kepes
Juliet's Shadow Caged
1938
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

Nathan Lerner
Cakes in the Window
1938
gelatin silver print
Milwaukee Art Museum

Peter Sekaer
The Youngest of the Parkinson Children
ca. 1938
gelatin silver print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Ben Shahn
Street Scene in Columbus, Ohio
1938
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art

James van der Zee
The Heiress, Harlem
1938
gelatin silver print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Lionel Wendt
Torso and Statue
ca. 1939
gelatin  silver print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Margaret Bourke-White
Coils of Aluminum Wire
1939
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Liz Gibbons with Camera
(fashion shot for Harper's Bazaar)
1938
gelatin silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Louise Dahl-Wolfe
Night Bathers
1939
gelatin silver print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

from Theory of Vision

Come, child, and with your sunbeam gaze assign

Green to the garden as a metaphor

For contemplation, seeking to declare

Whether by green you specify the green

Of orchard sunlight, blossom, bark, or leaf,

Or green of an imaginary life.

A mosaic of all possible greens becomes 

A premise in your eye, whereby the limes

Are green as limes faintly by midnight known,

As foliage in a thunderstorm, as dreams

Of fruit in barren countries; claims

The orchard as a metaphor of green.

Aware of change as no barometer

You may determine climates at your will;

Spectrums of feeling are accessible

If orchards in the mind will persevere

On their hillsides original with joy. 

Enter the orchard differently today:

When here you bring your earliest tragedy,

Your goldfish, upside-down and rigidly

Floating on weeds in the aquarium,

Green is no panorama for your grief

Whose raindrop smile, dissolving and aloof,

Ordains an unusual brightness as you come:

The brightness of a change outside the eye,

A question on the brim of what may be,

Attended by a new, impersonal green.

The goldfish dead where limes hang yellowing

Is metaphor for more incredible things,

Things you shall live among, things seen, things known.

– James Merrill (1946)