Max Beckmann’s Orange

I see that there’s a retrospective exhibition in Holland of the works of Max Beckmann. It would be a thrill to stand before his paintings again. When I last saw his work in L.A. a few years ago, I had an epiphany about the color orange as I stood before his glowing paintings. Orange (never my favorite color) had instantaneously became luscious, inviting, and yet sinister where it had been laid down by Beckmann’s brush. It impelled me to step toward it. It made me gasp in pleasure. It made me believe I had never really SEEN orange before. In that gallery, on that day, among those paintings, the oranges of Beckmann changed my reaction to that color forever, whether it’s in the produce department of Stater Brothers, the cushion aisle at Target, or in a candle display at Pier One. I judge all things colored orange to the Max Beckmann orange standard. None of them have ever enthralled me the same way.

The show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam includes Beckmann’s Carnival triptych. This work is quintessentially Beckmann. The first thing I see is that orange. It permeates the work. Starting from the left it’s in the woman’s hair, the drapery in the mirror, smudged on her leg and the floor. In the central panel it’s centered on the round object, and peeks out in the background. It crescendos in the final panel, blazing out in the harlequin’s outfit, blowing away the thin wash in the background. Like a mesmerist, it pulls your eyes throughout the work, then blasts you with its intensity in the finale.

Beckmann’s Carnival is a summation of his mature style, one that developed in the ten productive years he spent in Holland after being branded decadent and depraved in Hitler’s Germany. Beckmann had already been creating works that expressed the revulsion and fear he experienced during WWI. Bitter and depressed like his native country, he began to create works that expressed the horrors that haunted him. In Carnival, the human figures dominate each panel, sometimes being so immense they’re cut off by the frames. Perhaps the bleak vacancies of no-man’s land he saw btween the WWI trenches compelled him to crowd the spaces of his panels with full-bodied but distorted, enigmatic figures.

As an art historian, I find it a visual treat to look for metaphoric clues artists leave embedded in their work. Beckmann’s paintings are loaded with symbolism and personal obsessions. Borrowing from the Northern Renaissance masters, he used the three-panel triptych form. Fish, horns, drums, and stringed instruments, like those used by Bosch, frequently appear with his distorted figures, along with swords, masks, candles, cigarettes, and uniforms. All is done in his signature style of harsh outlines, compressed space, and complex compositions, making the scenes grim and haunting.

Beckmann’s orange isn’t the warm, cozy color of autumn leaves, or the vibrant, happy orange of summer. The closest it comes to Feng Shui’s “social” color is that it, like Beckmann’s whole body of work, promotes conversation. His paintings still communicate to us the ideas he struggled with. How can you find any meaning in human existence? How can you survive the contradictions of the modern world? For me, I escape by going into the orange.

Some thoughts on the WACK! show

I commend the M.O.C.A in Los Angeles for exhibiting the WACK!” show at the Geffen Contemporary. It’s a survey of the feminist art movement that made a huge impact on the art world during the 1970s. These women artists daringly challenged the art edifice by attacking long held notions.

In art history, students learn to study art using the Form and Content method, and must take into consideration the cultural context within which the artworks were made. When viewing the WACK! show, the viewer is certainly bruisingly aware of the Content. The ideas, meanings and messages are abundantly clear. The raw, angry energy, erotic stirrings, ironic juxtapositions, and metaphoric reversals stay with you well after leaving the show, so on that level the works in the WACK! exhibit are successful.

And the works certainly had an impact on the cultural context during the 70’s. They were the visual vanguard during a period of cultural revolution, when gender issues clashed with the patriarchal status quo, and feminism gave mainstream art a highly influential kick-in-the-pants. Hooray for feminist art.

Now, that leaves the Form. The art object. Here’s where WACK! disappoints. With the exception of a few notable works that stand out as vibrant exceptions, too many of the works are naïve, clumsy, strident, gratuitously repulsive, and often violent. Figures are amateurishly proportioned, brushstrokes are thoughtless, and blatant, intimate body parts leave no room for metaphor or introspection.

That said, WACK! is nevertheless an ambitious show and gives us a broad overview of at seminal moment in the history of modern art. Four hundred and fifty works by artists from twenty-one countries were assembled in a truly block-buster show that only MOCA’s Geffen Center could pull off.
Hooray for M.O.C.A.

Stabiae—the Little-Known Jewel and the New Pompeii?


It was only a few years ago as I stood on a train platform in Naples, that I first heard there was archaeological digging going on at a buried site called Stabiae. I was trying to make sure I was in the right waiting area to go south to Pompeii. I asked a pleasant-looking young woman who spoke English if this was indeed where I should be. When I told her how excited I was about seeing Pompeii again, she mentioned she was working at an ancient Roman site further along the train route called Stabiae. She said they were in the midst of uncovering the ancient city, and that soon it would be open for people to visit.

It seems I should be making plans once again to make my way from Naples south about 30 km to what is now called Castellammare di Stabia, two and a half miles from Pompeii. But to get a glimpse of ancient Stabia’s grandeur ahead of time, there’s a four-year traveling show called “In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite” touring the U.S., and now at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin. Beautiful fresco wall paintings and reliefs with scenes of the gods are the major part of the show that was organized by the Superintendancy of Archaeology of Pompei and the RAS, Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation. Visitors will see the first treasures from the site to be shown in the U.S., and more pieces of art are heading to St. Petersburg in Russia. These exhibitions are planned to pave the way toward making the site one of the largest archaeological parks in Europe, and a major tourist attraction.

The paintings and reliefs in the exhibit come from the excavation of several sumptuous sea-view villas owned by Roman nobility in the first centuries BC and AD. In the summer months when the smell of the fetid Tiber River in Rome became intolerable, they moved south to their elegant villas along the coast, making the area the power center of the ancient Roman world for a few months. Here they schemed their politics, enjoyed their fountains and pools, bathed in saunas and indoor baths, and strolled along shaded porticoes that framed their gardens. Stunning artwork graced the interiors including frescoes, mosaics, and statuary.

After the Chazen show, the exhibit will travel to Dallas Museum of Art and the Cummer Museums in Jacksonville FL, but for now, I’ll have to be satisfied with the catalogue ($47.50 + $9.00 shipping), and updates about the excavations from the RAS newsletter and website. http://www.stabiae.org/newsletter/newsletter2.html - one
http://www.lifeinitaly.com/art/stabiae.asp