Max Beckmann -The Years in Exile Guggenheim Museum, Soho, New York.

1996 There are few artists this century whose work evinces the breadth of vision and depth of symbolic elaboration as the artists of medieval and Gothic churches. Max Beckmann is one of them. It is thirty one years since a New York museum has devoted a show to his work. ln London, an exhibition of his triptychs at the Whitechapel Gallery in the early 1980s was the last time significant works by this great artist were seen in that England. Here in Portugal, he is hardly spoken about, let alone seen. It is difficult to imagine why an artist of such stature and vision has had such a low profile. He seems now like the beacon of an era, and his works maintain a freshness, with their jagged forms and vivid colours, and a relevance that make Beckmanns paintings leap off the walls with energy. Now, the downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum in New York is showing ninetten major works by Bekmann in an exhibition dealing with his years in exile. It is one of the most stunning exhibitions I have seen in years. After Hitler came into power, in 1933, Beckmann's work was systematically confiscated from German museums. He was forced to leave Frankfurt in 1933, moving first to Berlin, then later to Amsterdam, where he lived and worked for ten

years, finally moving to New York in 1947, where he died three years later. This
exhibition brings together the nine extraordinary triptychs he painted during this period, together with other related works. The first triptych, Departure of 1932-3, allegorises the artist's imminent departure from Frankfurt. The brutal images of mutilation in the side panels are contrasted with the peaceful central panel, where the departure is figured as a new beginning and a possible liberation as the king releases a net full of fish into the ocean. The Argonauts of 1950 is the last triptych Beckmann painted, and he is known to have worked on Jasons head shortly before dying. Here, Beckmann uses the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece to present us with an allegory of the soul in search of truth. The seven triptychs painted between the first and last triptychs cover a huge range of contemporary, mythological and autobiographic topics,

ln the triptychs, Beckmann uses the conventional format of Gothic altarpieces to shape modern-day fables of a collapsing world, where the individual is pitted against terrifying external circumstances. His nostalgia for the good old days of early German artistic traditions remains implicit in the roughly hewn forms that are reminiscent of wooden church carvings, and the jewelled colours that, encased in heavy black lines, evoke of stained glass. But, unlike the work of Georges Rouault, there is nothing maudlin about these allusions to ecclesiastic art. Rather, they are overseen by a mordant irony. Beckmann shows us a godless world , where humans have run amok. In these monumental works, Beckmann interjects with self portraits, either on his own, or with his wife Quappi. They show a heavy-set, guarded man, with piercing, alert eyes. A focus on instruments of communication, both in the portraits and in the triptychs a megaphone, musical instruments, newspapers attest to a need to connect and communicate at a time when channels of communication were being violently censored. The theatrical settings of several of the triptychs seem to simulate a stage and the mythological images are the disguises Beckmann uses for an iconography fraught with political meaning and intent.

Beckmann packs the space of his pictures with images jostling together, vying for attention. He overlays images of present-day hell (the mutilation in dungeons, the figures bound and gagged) with motifs from music-halls and vaudeville; masked warriors and terrifying birds merge with princes, gangsters and prostitutes; Christian, Greco-Roman, Hindu and Gnostic legends all lend their symbolic weight, contributing to his endeavour to unveil both the workings of power, and the power of inner worlds. "What I am chiefly concemed with in my painting is the identity that lies concealed behind surface reality", Beckmann noted. "I seek, in the here and now, a bridge to the invisible...It is my constant aim to comprehend the magic of reality and to transmute that reality into painting. Pardoxical as it might sound, it is reality that constitutes the true mystery of existence."
Ruth Rosengarten Published in Viso, 26 December 1996