Scratched Up and Raw: The Print World of Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann (1884 –1950) was a German artist most known for his expressive style in both painting and printmaking. He rejected association with the German Expressionists in favor of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), which was a movement deviating away from the deeply emotional aspects of Expressionism. What has always drawn me to Beckmann's print work is his passionate and raw line. His scratched, even ugly, lines are often counter-weighted against a delicate, almost tracery web which weaves his images together. There is intimacy between his lovers/characters, and then in a flip of reality we see his own deeply disturbed pain searing through us through his self-portrait series.

Max Beckmann was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony, during the German Empire. He enrolled at the Weimar Academy of Arts in 1899 and, between 1903 and 1904, traveled to Paris, Geneva, and Florence. During WWI, Beckmann volunteered to work as a medical orderly. He served in Belgium, where he met fellow artist Erich Heckel. He was discharged in 1915 after suffering a nervous breakdown. In 1925 he was appointed professor to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt.

The successes of Beckmann’s early career changed once Adolf Hitler came into power. In 1933, the Nazi government labelled Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik" and dismissed him from his teaching position in Frankfurt. In 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums, and several pieces were included in the now infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. That same year, Beckmann took his wife, left Germany, and lived a ten year self-imposed exile in Amsterdam.

After the war, Beckmann and his wife moved to the United States, and he taught art at Washington University in St. Louis. Beckmann then taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, during the summer of 1949 and the following fall at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He and his wife later moved to New York City where he died of a heart attack in 1950.

The trauma Beckmann experienced in the war moved his artwork away from most classical interpretations of the human figure to something distorted and fractured. His compositions became angled, broken and chaotic. There was no space to breathe or room to maneuver within. Ultimately, this scratched up distortion affected his view of himself, which can be easily seen in his featherly, yet raw-looking self-portraits.


Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting in a deeply personal form of modernism. He greatly admired the artwork of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Bosch, Bruegel and Grünewald. His composition style is also rooted in the tradition of medieval stained glass, the early renaissance idea of the triptych and he expanded them to include contemporary events.

Beckmann saw the world as a tragedy of man's inhumanity to man, and he saw life as a carnival of human folly. His work remained intense and allegorical throughout his career, but after the mid-1920s his style of painting changed to include Expressionistic brushwork and brighter colors. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic's cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. His subjects and symbols expressed universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate.

As for his printmaking, Beckmann made a total of 373 prints, all black and white, most of them produced between 1914 and 1923. He preferred etching and drypoint, but also worked in lithography; and he made woodcuts. Most of his prints were issued by leading dealer-publishers, including Paul Cassirer and J. B. Neumann, in Berlin, and Reinhard Piper, in Munich, although in 1921 Beckmann signed an exclusive contract with J. B. Neumann.

Like some of his art colleagues, Beckmann’s work falls within art movements, never clearly embracing one over another, so he, like the artists Oscar Kokoshka and Frida Kahlo, remain unique and outside normal categorization.
Lastly, the Parisian novelist and art historian, Stephan Reimertz, published Max Beckmann’s biography Eine Liebe im Porträt. Minna Tube - Künstlerin im Schatten von Max Beckmann,
Publ: Rowohlt Tb. 2002

Awards & Major exhibitions:
1912 First solo show, Kunstverein, Magdeburg, and Grossherzogliches Museum für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, Weimar
1926 First show in the United States, J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle, New York
1927 Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf
1928 Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim
1930 exhibitions in Basle and Zurich
1938 First of numerous exhibitions at Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery, New York
1948 First retrospective in the United States, the City Art Museum, Saint Louis
1949 First prize in the exhibition Painting in the United States, the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh
1964-65 Museum of Modern Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago
1984 Nassau County suburban art museum, NY
1995 Museum of Modern Art
1996 Guggenheim Museum
1996 Rome and Valencia
1997 Madrid
1998 Zurich
1998 St. Louis
2000 Munich
2006 Frankfurt
2007 Amsterdam
2002 Centre Pompidou, Paris
2003 Tate Modern
2011 Städel,Frankfurt

Printmaking's Day-Dreamer - Marc Chagall

Marc Zaharovich Chagall , 1887-1985, (whose given name was  Moishe Shagal), was born in Liozna, near the largely Jewish city of Vitebsk  in Belarus, (then part of the Russian Empire) . He lived a good portion of his life in France and has been considered one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He worked in painting, stained glass, tapestries and fine art prints. 

Marc Chagall spent an enormous amount of time making prints and they are highly sought in the markets. Their wistfulness and sweetness is like candy to a child, but they do describe a magical existence where people can often daydream.  He was not concerned about people’s perceptions of his work. He made images that were personally up-lifting, and the pure saturation of his colors crank up the volume on emotion. I, for one, do not care for his continued use of unmodified colors, or a lot of his child-like rendering of figures, but I can appreciate his effort to bring a sense of wonder about the world to each of his works. In doing this article I selected images that I felt had something ‘fresh’ about them. Honestly, his more starkly black and white prints are quite appealing. A lot of Chagall’s work reflects his contacts and exposure to the Parisian artistic hub working before and during the world wars. There are clear references to Picasso and Leger, while some works relate more clearly with his work in stained glass. In any case, I hope you will enjoy this assortment for your holiday viewing pleasure.

Biography

Chagall was the eldest of nine children. His family’s name, Shagal is a variation of the name Segal, which is a Levitic group within a Jewish community. His was a deeply religious Hasidic family and he credited the Hasidic culture with having a major impact upon his work. He developed a style that dealt with Jewish folk culture and his childhood memories of life in Vitebsk. Throughout his career "he remained true to his Jewish roots.”

As a child, Chagall studied Hebrew and the Bible at the local Jewish religious school. When he saw a fellow student drawing one day, he claimed it was a revelation and he told his mother that he would become an artist. 

Chagall moved to St. Petersburg in 1906  to study art.  He studied under  Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting and he stayed in St. Petersburg until 1910.  Then he moved to Paris to develop his artistic style,  enrolling at the  La Palette art academy.  His sensibility for color was pure,  unabashed and he was soon recognized by poets, writers and artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. In Paris, he became aware of the latest art movements Cubism, Fauvism and eventually Surrealism, but the subject of his work in Paris remained his homeland. He painted Jewish subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, and "… they were  his dreams". Although some of his imagery influenced other surrealist artists,  Chagall did not want his work to be associated with any movement.  He considered his work unique and the symbols associated with it deeply personal.

His goal during this period was to become a successful artist to provide for his family, and as opportunity would have it, he became the Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk, establishing a distinguished art school in the Soviet Union. In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Famine had spread after the war ended in 1918 and Chagall found work as an art teacher to war orphans. After struggling for two years, he moved back to France to develop his art. 

In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to France. He formed a business partnership with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. It was then he began to make etchings and other prints for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's Dead Souls, the Bible, and the Fables of La Fontaine. During this period he also traveled throughout France,  Holland, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Palestine. Chagall felt at home in Palestine amongst the Yiddish and Russian population. He later told a friend that Palestine gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received", and as a result, he immersed himself in "the history of the Jews”.

When Hitler gained power in Germany, anti-Semitism laws were being introduced and Dachau had been established. The Nazis had begun their campaign against anything abstract, expressionist or surreal, intellectual, Jewish, foreign, socialist-inspired, or difficult to understand.  The new German authorities made a mockery of Chagall's art, and he and his work was pronounced degenerate.  It had a profound effect upon the artist.

After Germany invaded and occupied France, Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until 1940 that he began to understand the Vichy government began approving anti-Semitic laws and that Jews were being systematically removed from public and academic positions. Many Russian and Jewish artists sought escape to the United States,  including Chaim Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann,  author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov. It was  Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art and Chagall’s daughter Ida, who helped Chagall and his wife come to the United States in 1941. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by Varian Fry, the American journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, who ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US by providing them with forged visas. 

Once in the US, Chagall befriended other European artists like Piet Mondrian and André Breton, but he found himself out of favor with American tastes regarding contemporary art. Americans“had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." Those attitudes changed in 1941 when  Henri Matisse’s son Pierre became his representative and manager. He caught the attention of critics and collectors throughout Europe, and for the rest of his life enjoyed enormous, prolific success. 

Chagall's colors attracted and captured the viewer's attention. During his earlier period his work was limited by an emphasis on form but his colors were a living part of the picture and suggested movement and rhythm.  Lovers, musicians and acrobats were often a part of his subject matter.  They represented, "a sort of grace, delicacy, precariousness, and a fragility of love and life.

Chagall once said of his work 'I don't understand them at all. They are not literature. They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me...”I painted pictures upside down, decapitated people and dissected them, scattering the pieces in the air, all in the name of another perspective, another kind of picture composition and another formalism”.

In 1960, Chagall began creating stained glass windows,  which I will admit feel the most truly spontaneous creations of his long career. They are pure joy and he enjoyed seeing natural light pass through their many-colored panes. The ephemeral experience of seeing people stop in jaw-gaping awe at the windows at the Art Institute of Chicago was always an amazing sight. They transcended the everyman’s artistic experience and brought beauty to their existence.

On a personal note, Chagall married his first love Bella. A year later, they had a daughter, Ida. In 1944, Bella died and Chagall didn’t make any art for many months. He later was associated with Virginia Haggard, great-niece of the author Henry Rider Haggard. They had a son, David McNeil.  In the 1950s, he was introduced to Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background and they remained companions for many years. The gravestone of Marc Chagall and his wife can be found in Saint Paul de Vence, France.

The famed 20thc. art critic Robert Hughes said Chagall w as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century".  Pablo Picasso even once rdeclared that "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is". Although he was personally caught up in the horrors of European history between 1914 and 1945: world wars, revolution, ethnic persecution, the murder and exile of millions, he chose to put his experiences into images to which everyone could immediately respond. He was also referred to as a "poet, dreamer, and exotic apparition."

From his vivid imagination and memories Chagall was able to use scenes of peasant life, and intimate views of a Jewish village. There was much to support a child-like view of innocence and love of the world which Chagall never really lost, but the realities of his long life saw tragedy and loss like everyone else’s. What is amazing about his work is that it retains an outward ‘joie de vivre’ into the 21^st century, and that it will most likely endure throughout the ages. 

Exhibitions:

1939, Carnegie Prize, Pittsburgh, PA

1960, Brandeis University, honorary degree in Laws, at its 9th Commencement

1967, "Message Biblique", the Louvre,  Paris, France

1969, Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall. 

1969 to 1970, "Hommage a Marc Chagall",  the Grand Palais,  Paris, France

1973, The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia

1977, the city of JerusalemYakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award.

1982,  Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden

1985, the Royal Academy in London , England

2003, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris,  a major retrospective in conjunction with the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Nice, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Public collections:

Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Biblical Message Museum,  Nice, France

Church of St. Stephan,  Mainz, Germany

Fraumünster abbey,Zurich, Switzerland

Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem , Jerusalem, Israel

Lincoln Center, New York, NY

Marc Chagall Museum,Vitebsk, Belarus. It was the family home on Pokrovskaya Street.

The Marc Chagall Yufuin Kinrin-ko Museum , Yufuin, Kyushu, Japan

Metropolitan Opera, NY

Metz Cathedral,Notre-Dame de Reims, France

Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas, Texas

'Palais Garnier' (the Opera de Paris), France

The only church in the world with a complete set of Chagall window-glass is in Tudeley,  Kent, England

Union Church of Pocantico Hills. Commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

United Nations Headquarters, NY

The Degenerate Prints of Kathe Kollwitz

The works in this article speak to a human truth about the depths of one's despair, death and the wretchedness of one's existence to survive without their loved ones. The artist whose brave hand unflinchingly created these pieces is Käthe Schmidt, more famously known as the artist/printmaker Kathe Kollwitz. She lived and worked in one of the most tumultuous periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, and experienced atrocities few would want to survive, but she spoke the truth with her scathingly critical lines and her rapiered compositions.  For her labors, she was eventually dubbed a 'degenerate' by Hitler's art elite, and while that's a matter of skewed opinion, history has since borne her work out as among the most moving tributes to humanity, on a par with the works of Goya, Delacroix and Dix.

Kathe was born on July 8th, 1867, in the East Prussian industrial city of Konigsberg. Her modest upbringing 'sparked' from a household fervently interested in discussions on social/political issues and Karl Marx; plus her maternal grandfather, Julius Rupp, was the leader of the Free Congregation movement. 

Both her father and grandfather were a big influence upon Kathe and her career. Rupp had strong socialist views and had been imprisoned for his religious beliefs, while Kathe's father, Karl Schmidt,  was a moral idealist. He encouraged his three daughters to have sympathy for the plight of the working-class, and he taught by guiding them rather than forcing his will upon them. He wanted his girls to be strong, believe in themselves and develop their individual talents. This was radical thinking in a period where women were encouraged to be mothers and housewives. 

The Schmidt family's involvement with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) enabled Käthe to meet Karl Kollwitz, whom she would eventually marry.  He was similarly passionate about politics and introduced her to the writings of August Bebel, who's socialist ideas wrote about the dissolution of marriage; and freeing women from their second-class status. Käthe was very interested in politics, and frequently read the work of Karl Kautsky, who was the period's best interpreter of Marx' theories.

Kathe's father believed she would become a great artist, and to encourage her, he arranged for Kathe, at the age of 14, to take art lessons with a local engraver, Rudolf Mauer. Two years later, Käthe went to study under the painter Emile Neide, and then she studied at the Berlin School for Women Artists under Karl Stauffer-Bern. In 1888 Käthe went to study at the Munich  Women's Art School. She also joined the informal Glücks-Café Composition Club, and the Munich Etching Club.Through her studies, it became apparent that her true interest was in the expressiveness of line and drawing, not with paint and color. She almost exclusively devoted herself for drawing and printmaking from this point forward.

Karl Kollwitz and Kathe were married in 1891 after Karl became a doctor. They moved to a working-class neighborhood of Berlin and both worked on pursuing their respective careers. In May, 1892, Käthe gave birth to her first child, a son, named Hans. Four years later, Käthe gave birth to her second son, Peter. Having children was a burden to her career, but her husband provided live-in support so she could continue her work. "I was more productive because I was more sensual, I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything."

Soon afterward, Kollwitz began to exhibit in Berlin, and received both criticism for her sex, and praise for her talent. Regardless, she soon rose to the artistic surface and generally received accolades for the honesty and truth of her work. She is known for having produced a series of lithographs illustrating the 1844 Weaver's Uprising, based upon the writings of Marx, who had proclaimed it as the birth of a German workers' movement. Kollwitz went on to produce other series of prints and drawings based upon social/political and deeply personal issues: namely losses of sons and children which was something she'd experienced firsthand during the World Wars due to the deaths of her son Peter, and Peter's son. There ones sees her lines are simultaneously as sharp as a razor blade and softly caressing as a warm blanket.

Kollwitz' work has shone as a beacon of light in the darkness  - letting us see the depths of her own despair, but also those of the German people. They suffered loss and shame and world rebuke for their atrocities, but they were human, too. Mothers lost their children,  husbands, fathers and brothers. Children starved to death and everyone suffered collateral damage from battles. There was no relief.  I have seen her etchings and lithographs and rarely do I see someone so adept at drawing that the lines literally pulsate and 'breathe'. Kollwitz is among that caliber of artists, and I, for one, am grateful that her work exists to remind us what life is about, that expression, passion and emotions can jump off a page and leap into your heart, grab it, shake it up and make you weep. Her piece below is one such piece where a mother walks through an abandoned battlefield in the stealth of night, through blood and bodies strewed as far as one can see, shining a lone flashlight in the sea of dead faces, one after another, in a desperate search to find her child. It rips at our soul and we feel her plight. 

Kollwitz' work shows all of that and more through her prints, but while she received praised for her skills, she was eventually marked as a 'Degenerate' artist in WWII Germany, set up as an example of what 'not' to do, what was 'unacceptable' to the sterile genetic and artistic views of Adolph Hitler and his insane sense of Germanic euphemistic harmony. Her images of death and loss and Marxist worker revolts spoke against Hitler's watered-down group of 'sanctioned art' and she was put up to public revile. Thankfully, her work (and those other 'degenerate' artists) survive for us to know and be reminded that with wars' victory and glory comes sacrifice and tragic loss. The saying goes, 'that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger'.... Kollwitz'  own self-portrait series shows her pain and suffering, and a steely reserve to survive. If that's what it means to be a degenerate artist, then so be it. I'd prefer to have her crusading line (and anyone like her), draw the truth any day.