Max Beckmann and Ansel Adams at MoMA: Real Art vs Pretty Pictures

Weekend before last, I visited MoMA QNS to peruse the (relatively) latest exhibits of Ansel Adams and Max Beckmann works. The latter is a glittering and (literally) sharply outlined display of subversive social and political commentary in the form of paintings. The former is a chilly, lifeless assembly line of landscape dreck. Since the Adams exhibit received so much praise and studied ardor from its viewers while I was at MoMA, I will attempt, however trivial the effect, to right the balance by focusing solely on the Beckmann retrospective. Max Beckmann's work "defies categorization" but is no subtle fusion of the various movements afoot in Europe at the time. Instead, Beckmann created a kind of aberration and in doing so, crafted a unique voice that belonged to no group of ideologues or aesthetes. Beckmann's wartime experience informed this voice, making him an even more harsh critic of European society during the 20's and 30's and a harbinger of the scourge to come. Fighting in World War I, according to the exhibit's curator, Robert Storr, "instilled in him a sense of the universe as oscillating between apocalyptic confusion and harrowing existential emptiness." Over and over from his earlier (but still famous) work using crowded scenes of secular allegory to his later and steller triptychs, Beckmann delivers cruel lessons with heavy lines and queasy arrangements. The first paintings of the exhibit pay homage to realism and romanticism - he contemplates the sweeping tableau of Delacroix and harsh light of Courbet while dabbling in Fauvist coloration. In the mid to late 20's, his paintings veer toward the frank and unsmiling reality of post-war Germany - his edges thicken, his characters harden. The architecture of these works investigates an increasingly fractured world. With arms and legs akimbo, objects and elongated human appendages become swords dividing the canvas into warring plains. The theme of vaudeville and the circus appears more creepy, even raunchy, than pleasurable in the arrangement of Carnival (1925) and Aerial Acrobats (1928). Even the simple act of bathing, as in The Bath (1930) becomes topsy-turvy in Beckmann's new world. In the quintessential The Night (1918), a gruesome tale of brutality and repression, Beckmann hits a fevered pitch of angles and shapes. The upturned hat in the bottom center of the painting tells us that he likens the scene to a witch-hunt but the political identity of the torturers is ambiguous, leaving the viewer to assume the indictment is meant for all totalitarian/authoritarian regimes. A work familiar to you if you have a paperback copy of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Family Portrait (1920) is less chaotic but disturbing nonetheless in its timeless portrayal of the claustrophobic nature of domestic life. The plant looms like a spider, the ceiling droops, the figures nearly fill the space yet they are miserably remote. Recurring symbols and characters, like the puppet king in the top right corner, and Beckmann with a horn (symbolizing his perhaps arrogant belief that he is a messenger to be heeded) appear. Much of the work during the 20's and early 30's depicts a sneering absurdity in the guise of theatricality. Even so, the Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) appears to have both a reverence for and at the same time, an embarassment about the costume of the cultural elite. The Portrait of NM Zeretelli (1927) is similarly amibiguous - the actor is positively ludicrous in his cartoon-like blue suit and white makeup but at the same time, he is seated in a royal's chair and wears the expression of a bemused cynic. According to a Leon Golub, an American painter who studied Beckmann, "There is often an aspect of self-parody in Beckmann, even a clownishness...instead of bringing order to the situation [of Germany in the 1920's], he kicks it around and gives it a disorder all his own. " Next up...the infamous tryptichs of Max Beckmann...