The Max Beckmann Retrospective

Abstract

The centennial of the birth of Max Beckmann on February 12, 1884, was celebrated in a traveling exhibition of more than two hundred works, organized by the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen and Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Saint Louis (Missouri) Art Museum. The exhibition, which covered the entire span of Beckmann's work from 1901 to 1950, took place in the context of other, more concentrated presentations of specific aspects of his work, such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery's Max Beckmann: The Triptychs of 1980–81, which went on to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Städel in Frankfurt am Main, and the Städel's two exhibitions, the first of 1983 on early Beckmann, and the second of the winter of 1984 on the Frankfurt years from 1915 to 1933. On the whole, the serious intelligence brought to bear on the mounting of these major exhibitions has offered both critics and the gallery-going public the opportunity to reevaluate the work of an artist who insisted on the retention of value judgments and philosophical ideas within the framework of a modernist pictorial structure. Oddly enough, New York, where Beckmann died on December 20, 1950, did not have his retrospective.