Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Max Beckmann
German; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
87%
The Bath. 1930. Oil on canvas
Every time there's a surface in this painting that seems like it's angling to get identical with the picture plane, there comes some system of breaks and barriers above to push it back down screaming into pictorial depth. (This might have a thematic analogue in the drama of lust and repression — forthrightness and separation — that's taking place in the conjugal scene Beckmann's depicted.) There's that half-covered mirror, the woman arm-slicing her ham in half, the uptilted oval of bathwater obscured by the man inside. In the latter case it's quite literally the bather's "don't shoot" gesture that shoves the tub and water back into virtual space. And this whole apparatus of proposition and refusal is set off by that monstrous repoussoir at right — an angled band of black and brown that makes you feel like a voyeur while serving also as the sole consummated instance of perfect flatness in the picture. And yet, when you're looking at the painting, it mostly disappears. (2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
82%
Acrobats. 1937-39. Oil on canvas
This painting has the aspect of a masterpiece (scale, scope, complexity) but doesn't quite come off as one in the end. This might be because of its busyness, which itself isn't a shortfall but which Beckmann finds himself constantly needing to temper or justify. One way he does this (with varying success) is with the muddy handling that gives his surfaces that miasmic, gangrenous quality. Unlike Cézanne, whom that twisting woman's back certainly reminds you of but whose every stroke was self-complete — a world — and yet capable of combining with all the others to create a whole image, there's an indistinctness to how Beckmann's applied his paint. This relates to the painting's busyness because a totalizing, architectonic method like Cézanne's would have been untenable given such a crowded canvas as this: the miasma is like a counterpoint to representational density. But it needs somehow to be governed lest the painting lapses into a haze of paint, hence Beckmann's hard bounding lines to hold everything in place. And it's these that really reveal themselves to be the problem: for the effect of bounded miasmas to work, figure groups have to be a bit disconnected with plenty of pockets of space surrounding each figure. In the case of the central group this is productive — it feeds confounding the way the image pushes where it should pull and pulls where it should push — but elsewhere it seems undynamic (take the girl and the soldier at right). All that said, these are ultimately gripes with a good painting's foibles: few painters could achieve such a sharded intensity while still conveying pathos. (2025)