Although German Expressionist Max Beckmann was one of the greats of the 20th century, modern audiences don't quite know what to make of his work, writes Aidan Dunne.
Have we forgotten how to look at the work of a painter such as Max Beckmann, the great German Expressionist who died only half a century ago? He created pictures which address, in terms of vivid allegory, and from a humanist perspective, the historical circumstances of his turbulent life and times, and enduring truths about the human condition. But, to judge by much of the lukewarm critical response to Tate Modern's major retrospective of his work, the contemporary audience, perhaps attuned to irony and inconsequentiality in art, doesn't quite know what to make of him.
Mind you, he has always been something of an awkward customer, a truculent presence in the roll-call of great 20th-century painters, glaring balefully at us from a succession of stylish self-portraits. Because his work is so crowded with images and incident, it is tempting to read it purely in terms of content: the artist as the sum of his narratives. Beckmann's work is crammed with ambiguous narratives, strewn with symbols. And because he devised a simplified representational style, in which bold colours are supported by a firm scaffolding of broad black lines, it is easy to dismiss his work as harsh and garish.
All of which overlooks the remarkable quality of his painting. Certainly its content can be communicated very effectively in small reproductions, and it is the fate of a great deal of painting to be seen primarily in the form of reproductions. But Beckmann's work is absolutely wonderful at first hand. It loses out considerably in reproduction.
Reduction of scale and simplification of colour tends to coarsen the effect of his subtle use of black and brighter colours. Following on from Manet, his use of black is particularly daring and extremely effective. Like many great artists, he is very sparing in his use of pigment and colour. He uses only as much of both as he needs to get the job done. Nothing is there for effect or affectation. Standing in front of one of those startling self-portraits, what is surprising is not the audaciously loud colour but how little colour, how little of anything, is actually there. It is as if the image we see, for all its emphatic presence, is conjured up out of next to nothing.
As far as the formal qualities of his work go, even in his time Beckmann was a conservative, distrustful and disapproving of what he perceived as the frivolities of Matisse and Picasso. Initially he looked to the Romantic tradition for models, to Delacroix, for example. But a slow-burning influence was ignited by his entranced discovery of medieval German and Flemish painting. The severity of Grunewald and the awkward spatial visualisation of the pre-Renaissance have more to do with his jagged images and compressed pictorial space than the cool, elegant fragmentation and distortions of Cubism or Matisse. Yet the effect can be superficially similar.
Although branded as degenerate by the Nazis and an exile from Germany from 1937, Beckmann never professed to hold the moral high ground. He just wanted to get on with his work.
Born in Leipzig in 1884, he was already well established as a painter in Germany by the outbreak of the first World War. His painting was ambitious but conservative and overblown in the way it recycled elements of classical and romantic tradition.
The war changed all that, but not in a predictable fashion. He immediately volunteered and served as a nurse, and then as a medical orderly in Belgium.
It is no exaggeration to say that he relished the extremity of experience to which the war gave him access.
In recording the horrors of shattered bodies and surreal destruction he maintained a curious, and characteristic, detachment. Even in his account of drawing in a ruined village into which shells were still falling he seems oddly remote from the scene.
In time, events overwhelmed his defences, however, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. He returned to Germany and civilian life. During this time he became interested in various hermetic mystical traditions, and even in the spurious spiritualism of Helena Blavatsky, which he took entirely seriously. But his wartime experience and a resultant disenchantment with human nature engendered a new urgency and toughness in his work, culminating in what is widely regarded as his breakthrough picture, The Night, completed in 1919.
In this nightmarish painting, a couple are being attacked and casually tortured by a gang who seem to have invaded their home. Although it relates immediately to the birth of the Weimar Republic, in the context of the history of the 20th century, there is a prophetic force to the painting in its depiction of ordinary people as mere playthings for zealots and ideologues.
Beckmann again built up his artistic career, but with the rise of the National Socialists in the 1930s he was systematically frozen out of cultural and public life. He lost his professorship and his works were purged from public collections. Having listened to Hitler's speech at the opening of the infamous exhibition of "Degenerate Art" in 1937, in which his own work was included, he packed his bags and, with his second wife, Quappi, headed for Amsterdam. There they remained, with some apprehension, throughout the years of the second World War. Friends had tried to arrange a teaching post for him in the United States, but this only materialised in 1947.
He lived in the US from then until his death, in 1950.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he produced much of his finest work. The world in this mature work collapses down into a narrow, claustrophobic stage, a theatricalised niche from which there is no escape. He himself presides over a shadowy, candlelit realm freely compounded of elements of cabaret, circus and fairground, classical mythology, and autobiography.
All his sources, in short, fed into an eclectic personal iconography that could be applied to any situation and infused even the most ordinary subject matter, including landscape, still life and portraits, with a sense of brooding unease.
It is generally felt that, for all his distinctive qualities, Beckmann had no obvious successors in 20th-century painting. His stance as detached observer holds true even for his position in art history. But his work has a particular resonance for artists in Ireland.
He is a definite and perceptible influence on the Scottish painter John Bellany, who has exhibited extensively in Ireland, and on Irish artists Michael Cullen and Graham Knuttel.
His leanings towards magic and mysticism contribute to the sense of brooding mystery and unease that underpins his compositions. Those particular qualities have been widely adopted by artists who do not share a recognisable stylistic affinity with him.
Apart from the more public preoccupations evident in his well-known works such as The Night, there is an intensely personal side to his work, a concern for what he described as our "limitless solitude in eternity". The sense of being apart, of being fundamentally alone in a frightening and indifferent world, is most striking in his remarkable self-portraits and in his equally striking paintings of couples.
Max Beckmann is at Tate Modern, Backside, London until May 5th (Admission £8, £6 concessions). An illustrated catalogue, Beckmann, edited by Sean Rainbird, is available at an exhibition price of £25.