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<\/p>\nThe paintings of the German artist Max Beckmann are easy to recognise but hard to categorise.\u00a0Often mislabelled\u00a0as an Expressionist or else vaunted\u2014to his chagrin\u2014as a leading figure of the Weimar era\u2019s New Objectivity movement, Beckmann (1884-1950) was a singular, wilful figure, with a sharp but ethereal palette and a crowd of recurring figures that included circus characters, street toughs and his own menacing, mask-like face.<\/p>\n
However, an exhibition opening this month at Frankfurt\u2019s St\u00e4del Museum stresses the importance of Beckmann not as a painter but as a draughtsman. The show, Beckmann,\u00a0is a rarity for the artist, focusing solely on his drawing in 80 works, including loans from major collections on both sides of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
The exhibition is curated by Regina Freyberger, Stephan von Wiese and Hedda Finke. (This month, the latter two are publishing the first two parts of their three-volume catalogue raisonn\u00e9 of Beckmann\u2019s drawings.) The show will begin in the decade before the First World War, when Beckmann was shaking off the residue of German Impressionism and absorbing the impact of French Post-Impressionism; an early, soft-featured self-portrait from 1912, rendered in pencil, could be from the late 19th\u00a0century.<\/p>\n
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Max Beckmann’s Woman with Candle (Quappi) (1928) Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett; Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel<\/p>\n
The war\u00a0strongly affected Beckmann, with his experience as a medic leading to an apparent breakdown in 1915. But the conflict also made him a major artist by wholly reconfiguring his art. His hard-edged signature style first\u00a0emerged in\u00a0his drawing, Freyberger says, and coincided with a new approach to drawings generally,\u00a0which by the 1920s had\u00a0gone\u00a0from painting studies to\u00a0autonomous works of art.<\/p>\n
In 1925, Beckmann divorced his first wife, the opera singer Minna Tube, and married the Bavarian-born Mathilde \u201cQuappi\u201d von Kaulbach, who became his lasting muse. In a 1928 drawing of Quappi holding a candle, the artist vividly captures the effect of light on her face and chest by using little more than chalk and pencil on cardboard.<\/p>\n
After the Nazis came to power, Beckmann was fired from his prestigious teaching post at Frankfurt\u2019s art academy, leading to his Dutch exile in 1937. The existential threat of the 1930s brought colour into his drawing, and\u00a0The Murder\u00a0(1933), from the St\u00e4del\u2019s own important collection,\u00a0uses watercolour and gouache over charcoal to\u00a0depict a tumultuous crime scene in eerie pastels.<\/p>\n
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Max Beckmann’s The Murder (1933) St\u00e4del Museum, Dauerleihgabe aus der Sammlung Karin & R\u00fcdiger Volhard; Photo: St\u00e4del Museum, Frankfurt am Main<\/p>\n
The exhibition will be rich in works\u00a0from the last decade of Beckmann\u2019s life,\u00a0starting with the pitch-dark war years cooped up in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, followed by a restless but rousing post-war turn in the US. Two works from 1949, completed in Colorado, reveal the artist\u2019s ambivalence towards the rawness and weirdness of the New World.\u00a0In\u00a0Rodeo,\u00a0a cowboy tossed into the\u00a0air is\u00a0a dire\u00a0reimagining\u00a0of a circus figure, while in a very late self-portrait Beckmann adopts an all-American cowboy hat\u2014but holds up an Old World emblem, in the form of a fish.<\/p>\n