Max Beckmann's Five Women

 

El Greco, The Opening of the Fifth Seal (The Vision of St John), 1608-14

"Oh, this infinite space! We must constantly fill up the foreground with junk so that we do not have to look in its frightening depth. What would we poor people do, if we would not always come up with some idea like country, love, art, and religion with which we can again and again cover up that dark black whole." (Max Beckmann, Letter, May 24, 1915)

 Max Beckmann, Still Life with Gramophone and Irises, 1924

The above still-life is a painting from Beckmann's first Frankfurt years made in the spring of 1924. It is the first in an important series of mysterious and complex allegorical still-life paintings that Beckmann was to make throughout his career. At the right of the painting, we see a woman's face wearing a carnival mask. This figure is a disguised portrait of Naila - the mysterious woman known as Dr. Hildegard Melms with whom Beckmann had an affair in 1923 and whom he later painted in his 1935 portrait of the five most beautiful women in his life, Five Women (Large Women Painting). For a long time her identity was unknown, although she appeared frequently on Beckmann etchings during the 1920s. 

 Max Beckmann, Sleeper, 1924

Also in 1924, Beckmann's sixteen year-long marriage to his first wife, Minna Tube, was disintegrating - as his affair with Naila indicated. At the same time Beckmann had met in Vienna the young violinist Mathilde "Quappi" von Kaulbach, daughter of the Munich painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach. This vivacious young woman would become the love of Beckmann's life , and he was to marry her after a second visit to Vienna the following year. Beckmann must have been pretty much confused (or distracted) that year: In the above painting, Sleeper, he mounted the face of a sleeping Quappi on Minna Tube's curvacious body.

 

Max Beckmann, Portrait Minna Beckmann-Tube, 1924

Max Beckmann and Minna Tube had first met each other in 1902 at the Großherzogliche Kunstschule zu Weimar (Grand Ducal Art School at Weimar), which only just then had begun to admit women. A young woman who studied art at the turn of the century, as this daughter of a military priest, had her own head. Beckmann once noted to "never have completely possessed her" was a "huge imposition" for him. The price he demanded when they married in 1906 was, from today's perspective, outrageous: Minna had to give  up painting. However, she began immediately a vocal training, and later had a respectable career as an opera singer.

 Minna Beckmann-Tube as Venus in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser, Dessau 1916

 

Until 1913 Beckmann signed virtually all his work with the code MBSL (Max Beckmann Seiner Liebsten = Max Beckmann to his Dearest). After the end of their marriage in 1924, they stayed in close contact, which can be explained by their son Peter, but also by the fact that Minna remained a trusted advisor and respected authority in matters of art. Beckmann's explicit condition before his marriage to Quappi in the same year was that he could continue to see his first wife, and could travel with her as well.

Max Beckmann, Five Women, 1935

Five women - probably not the only, but the most important in Beckmann's life, who, if we believe contemporary accounts, liked to present himself as a successful womanizer. The five ladies mostly knew each other, but to rally around all five in one place - that even a Beckmann could only manage by imagination. With a deeply slit back décolleté, Lilly von Schnitzler stands on the left side. Her blonde hair, the yolk-yellow robe, and the ermine bluntly show her position: The wife of the president of I.G. Farben, Georg von Schnitzler, (convicted as a war criminal in 1948) was the society lady par excellence. Whether she ever had an intimate relationship with Beckmann is uncertain. In any case, the aristocrat was attracted to Beckmann and built up a collection of his paintings that she later donated to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. She even invited Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in order to convince him of Beckmann's genius - the attempt was to no avail.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Five Women on the Street, 1913

The large woman standing to the right of Lilly von Schnitzler, showing a somehow brittle and dry impression, is Katharine Rapoport von Porada, for some observers "the most beautiful woman in Berlin". Beckmann had first met her in 1922 in Frankfurt. She wrote fashion articles for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. In 1926, Katharine moved to Paris, where she organized exhibitions that contributed significantly to Beckmann's fame. No coincidence that Quappi confidently stands in the middle with a fan. The sensual and elegant woman actually was the center for Max Beckmann. Finally, standing on Quappi's right, an angry looking Naila seems to direct with her left hand the rivals to the exit door.

 

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927

But Beckmann also portrayed himself in the picture - hidden in the mirror, that Minna Beckmann-Tube is showing towards the viewer. However, not the mature artist, a man in his early fifties, is reflected, not the familiar angular Beckmann-head, but the round face of the young man that was seen on a photo of his first wedding banquet. This could well be a self-ironic reference to the Judgement of Paris motif: When Zeus held a banquet, Eris, goddess of discord, was uninvited. Angered by this snub, Eris threw a golden apple (the Apple of Discord) into the proceedings, upon which was the inscription καλλίστῃ ("for the fairest one"). Three goddesses claimed the apple: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and eventually Zeus, reluctant to favour any claim himself, declared that Paris, a mortal, would judge their cases, for he had recently shown his exemplary fairness in a contest with the god of warfare, Ares.

 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The Judgement of Paris, 1913

After Beckmann's death in 1950 in New York (the last two words in his notebook were: "Quappi angry."), Five Women remained in the possession of Quappi until she sold it in 1963 through a New York gallery to the private Spiro Collection. Why did Quappi show the image so late to the public - in 1963, at its first and only exhibition in Karlsruhe? Probably, the widow did not handle well the fact, that five women were seen, lined up in stately pose (few things recall the exuberance of a "party" as the Americans casually dubbed the image).

 

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

With this great painting Beckmann not only built a monument for five of his wives, lovers and friends, but, as one art critic slyly remarked, also established a reference to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. That would not be very charming: Picasso's famous ladies get-together took place in a brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona.

Max Beckmann's Journey on the Fish

On the table gaily set, behold, within the dish,

the fishes' queer countenance.

Fish are mute ... so one thought. Who knows?

Is there not a place where the language of the fish,

in their absence, is at last in common parlance?

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2, XX

 Max Beckmann, Journey on the Fish, 1933

After Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, Beckmann lost his teaching position at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and was forced to retreat into private life. His painting Journey on the Fish (above) is the recognition of the 50-year-old that his destiny was now inevitably bound to that of his second wife Quappi. The doubling of the motifs - fish, persons, and masks (of which one shows Beckmann's profile, the other that of Quappi) - captures the theme of the linked pair. Joined in unity with two fish, the couple seems to stumble towards an abyss, although it is not clear whether they are headed for a black seashore or a dark chasm. The fish played a significant role in Beckmann’s work - as a symbol of phallus, fertility and animal nature. In this painting, the fish may be seen as the couple’s rescuer, leading them to new shores. The work is indicative of Beckmann's life circumstances at the time and a hint of his later emigration. 

Max Beckmann, The Small Fish, 1933

Beckmann, a vivid reader of Schopenhauer, and connaisseur of Greek and Eastern mythology might also refer to the Semitic god Dagon, part man and part aquatic animal. In the eleventh century, the Jewish bible commentator Rashi commented that the name Dagon is related to Hebrew dag (fish) and that Dagon was imagined in the shape of a fish. In the thirteenth century rabbi David Kimhi interpreted the odd sentence in Samuel 5.2-7 that "only Dagon was left to him" to mean "only the form of a fish was left", adding: 

It is said that Dagon, from his navel down, had the form of a fish, and from his navel up, the form of a man, as it is said, his two hands were cut off.

Beckmann's foresight employed the cut-off hand and fish symbol already in 1921:

Max Beckmann, The Dream, 1921

The fish form may also be considered as a phallic symbol as seen in Beckmann's The Small Fish (above) or in the story of the Egyptian grain god Osiris, whose penis was eaten by fish in the Nile after he was attacked by Set. Likewise, in the tale depicting the origin of the constellation Capricornus, the Greek god of nature Pan became a fish from the waist down when he jumped into the same river after being attacked by Typhon. John Milton used this myth in Paradise Lost:

Next came one

Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark
Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off,
In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge,
Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers:
Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high.

Max Beckmann, Departure (left panel), 1933

Beckmann (who hated talking about his paintings) once responded to a reporter asking why he put fish into so many of his paintings: "Because I like fish, both to eat and to look at. Also they are symbols." What do they symbolize? "Geist - spirit," Beckmann replied. "But the man who looks at my pictures must figure them out for himself." It is interesting to note that the first thing Beckmann said is that he simply likes fish - to eat and to look at. That is a good response. We do, after all, eat fish. Why do we eat? To live, to have strength, and to have potency. As Chesterton implies through a character in The Napoleon of Notting Hill:

A man strikes the lyre, and says, "Life is real, life is earnest," and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.

Hugo Erfurth

 Otto Dix, The Photographer Hugo Erfurth, 1925

Hugo Erfurth (1874-1948) was the portrait photographer par excellence of the intellectual and artistic avant-garde of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Many artists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee had their portraits taken in his atelier. He developed an elegiac style of portraiture. Erfurth’s work is characterized by a simple natural use of light, great psychological insight into the character of each of his subjects, and a masterful use of the technique of oil-pigment printing.

Hugo Erfurth,  Otto Dix with his painting class at the Dresden Academy, 1929

Erfurth studied art at the Academy of Arts in Dresden, Germany, from 1892 to 1896. Where he was trained in the aesthetics of Pictorialism and shaped by the compositional style of Art Nouveau. He worked as a portrait photographer in Dresden from 1896 until about 1925. From 1924 to 1948 he was chairman of the jury of the prestigious Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL). He worked in Cologne, Germany, from 1934 to 1943 and in Gaienhofen (Bodensee) from 1943 until his death in 1948. 

 Hugo Erfurth, Otto Dix and [actor] Heinrich George in front of his portrait, 1933

Otto Dix, Portrait of the Actor Heinrich George, 1932

 

Hugo Erfurth, Marc and Bella Chagall, 1923

 

 Hugo Erfurth, Oskar Kokoschka, 1920

 

Hugo Erfurth, Max Beckmann, 1928

 

 Otto Dix, Hugo Erfurth with Dog, 1926

Max Beckmann - A Vision

I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. (Max Beckmann)

 Max Beckmann, Galleria Umberto, 1925

We know that Mussolini was killed on April 28, 1945, by Italian partisans, and subsequently hung by his feet in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. However, this scene was painted by Beckmann twenty years before Mussolini's death! Erhard Göpel, an art critic who often visited Beckmann in his exile in wartime Amsterdam, gives the following account: 

"When, in 1925, he promenaded through the Galleria Umberto in Naples, he saw the flood of fascism rising, he saw carabinieri saving drowning people and a body hung upside down by ropes. He saw this in broad daylight. When Mussolini's fall was reported, he fetched the painting from the closet and showed it in his studio. He considered it a vision even before he knew that he had also foreseen the manner of the dictator's end hanging head down."

Benito Mussolini (2nd from left) and his lover Clara Petacci (3rd from left) exposed in Milan on April 29th, 1945.

Galleria Umberto contains many odd features, the strangest of which is the crystal ball hanging from the glass ceiling. Did Beckmann have clairvoyance in mind when he invented this translucent globe? Consciously, he probably wanted only to satirize the Italy of 1925. The fascists' murder of Giacomo Matteotti was widely interpreted as a storm signal just then, and Beckmann saw that gay vacationland Italy' symbolized by the mandolin, the bather, and the tootling blonde, was swamped by political repression. An Italian flag is drowning in the foreground.

 

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape, 1912


Locksley Hall
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1835)

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
 

Expressionist art offers several examples of this uncanny "second sight," the most literal being Ludwig Meidner's views of bombed and burning cities painted in 1913 (see above). And Beckmann pictured the Frankfurt synagogue in 1919 with its walls slanting as if they might topple at any moment:

 Max Beckmann, Die Synagoge in Frankfurt am Main, 1919

You can see more of Max Beckmann's works here on my Flickr page.

Kokoschka's War Paintings

Oskar Kokoschka, Anschluß-Alicia in Wonderland, 1942

Deemed a degenerate by the Nazis, Kokoschka fled Austria in 1934 for Prague. In 1938, when the Czechs began to mobilize for the expected invasion of the Wehrmacht, he fled to the United Kingdom and remained there during the war. The above painting is a harsh satire against the British appeasement policy (Treaty of Munich) which facilitated Hitler's annexion (Anschluß) of Czechoslovakia.

Oskar Kokoschka, Marianne-Maquis, 1942

1942 was a year of deadlock during the Second World War. Whilst the Soviet Union was battling the Nazis in the East, there were repeated calls for British and American governments to launch a Second Front in Western Europe. In Marianne-Maquis, Kokoschka vents his criticism of the allies’ delay by showing British war leaders Winston Churchill and General Montgomery drinking tea in the Café de Paris in Soho. The central figure is Marianne, the traditional personification of France, now linked to the Maquis, the French Resistance.

Oskar Kokoschka, Loreley, 1941

The title Loreley refers to Heinrich Heine's famous poem about a mythical Rhine maiden, who lured sailors to their death. Kokoschka explained that his painting mocks British claims to maritime supremacy:

Britannia no longer rules the waves; inaction has lasted too long; an octopus swims away with a trident, the emblem of marine power. Queen Victoria, who built up the British fleet into a dominant position, rides a shark and stuffs white, brown and black sailors into its mouth. Only the frog on her hand refuses to accept the same fate: it represents Ireland, where there are no reptiles except frogs.

It is interesting to compare Kokoschka's Loreley to another shipwreck piece which - painted by Max Beckmann almost thirty years earlier - can be seen as a vision of the approaching First World War:

Max Beckmann, Sinking of the Titanic, 1912

Max and Quappi Beckmann

 Max Beckmann, Carnival: The Artist and His Wife, 1925

Beckmann’s personal style softened perceptibly from the mid-1920s, when he met and married his second wife, Matilde von Kaulbach, better known as Quappi. An excellent violinist, much younger than he, from a well-to-do family, and very much in love, she may have been a distraction for the artist-moralist. Only two years earlier, when Beckmann was asked whether he would paint some war pictures, he replied: "Längst bin ich in anderen Kriegen" (I'm already in different wars). He regarded his art as a combat. But in 1925, he suddenly seemed to have concluded an armistice with his deeper problems. A great love of life inspired Beckmann at that time, and Quappi helped him to enjoy the present. The Beckmanns were popular with the artistically inclined society of Frankfurt, and Beckmann became the teacher of a master class. It may be noted that later on, when Nazi persecution, exile, hunger, cold, and danger changed their style of living, Quappi remained a most efficient helpmate. "She is an angel," Beckmann said, "sent to me so I could accomplish my work." In 1925 this lay far in the future. At the moment Max and Quappi are two figures from a new commedia dell'arte: harlequin and a lovely horsewoman with a funny hat. 

 Max Beckmann, Quappi in Pink, 1932

The thick black outlines, earlier used to convey his bitter condemnation of contemporary society, thenceforth served to define the facial features of his attractive young wife. Beckmann’s swift brushstrokes turn Quappi - portrayed here on a blue armchair, fashionably dressed and holding a cigarette - into a prototype of the modern woman; resolute and self-confident. The above portrait was started in 1932 and finished in 1934, by which time Beckmann had changed the date and also toned down Quappi’s smile to reflect the couple’s concern at the rise of the Nazis to power.

Max and Quappi Beckmann in front of Hotel „Stephanie“ in Baden-Baden, 1928