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.