Walking the Tightrope

“We are all tightrope walkers. With them it is the same as with artists, and so with all humanity,” Max Beckmann said in a 1948 speech titled "Letters to a Woman Painter." Born February 12, 1884, Beckmann served as a medic in the German army during World War I until he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1915, the year he painted his Self-Portrait as a Medic (above). Whereas before the war, Beckmann painted in an Old Master style, after his experiences, he became an Expressionist, reproducing the products of his tortured soul onto canvas. From a very early age, Beckmann studied philosophy, always seeking some meaning in the world. When that meaning became distorted in the trenches of the Great War, face to face with death and dismemberment as a medic, the world reflected in Beckmann’s eyes became a distorted nightmare.

As the years passed, Beckmann turned to painting in the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) style, the counter-reaction to the excesses of Expressionism and a more social type of art. Beckmann taught and shared in the hopeful, sometimes decadent freedoms of the Weimar Republic. The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, however, spelled the beginning of the end of Beckmann’s involvement in German art. In 1932, Beckmann painted the highly personal triptych Departure (above). Beckmann said of the right hand panel featuring a figure holding a lamp: “You can see yourself trying to find your way in the darkness, lighting the hall and staircase with a miserable lamp, dragging along tied to you, as part of yourself, the corpse of your memories." The “corpse” of Beckmann’s memories of a free Germany haunted him until his departure in 1937, after the “Degenerate Art” exhibition sealed his fate and that of all modern art in Hitler’s Germany. Beckmann, however, retained some sense of hope in his Departure in the center panel’s image of the queen carrying the treasure of freedom as her ship travels through darkness and brutality towards a better world.

Beckmann fled to Amsterdam until the end of World War II. He later emigrated to the United States, where he continued to paint large triptychs based on mystical and mythological themes, such as The Argonauts (above, from 1949-1950). Beckmann finished The Argonauts just before his death in 1950. To the end, Beckmann walked the tightrope, balancing himself emotionally and artistically through the exploration of ancient themes through the most modern of artistic styles.

Beyond Category

“I can't always reach the image in my mind,” Gerhard Richter once said. “Almost never, in fact. So that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.” Born February 9, 1932 in Germany, just before the Nazis rose to power and living through both the immolation of Germany during World War II and the separation of the country into East and West, Richter always strove to reach the images in his head, arriving finally at works such as G.A.4 (21.1.84) (above, from 1984). Richter remains today one of the most important painters of the twentieth century, especially in Gemany, but also remains an elusive figure. “Modern art has always only shown itself to me in trends and blowhards, so I couldn't be a modern artist,” he said in his resistance of labels. “There were always powerful movements or groups that today we don't even know anymore.” Richter has been and always will be a movement of one, going only where his imagination takes him and at his own pace.

Since the 1960s, Richter incorporates photography into his art, especially in printmaking. Sometimes, Richter goes for completely true fidelity, painting with almost photographic realism and hyper-realism. Other times, as in his Elizabeth (above, from 1966), a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, Richter takes the photographic presence and asks questions about reality and representation. By placing several photographs of the Queen slightly out of alignment, Richter creates a completely different portrait of the monarch that is simultaneously identifiable yet unrecognizable. Richter himself seems always questioning of his identity as an artist. “I never worked at painting as if it were a job,” he once said. “It was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.” By resisting the labels of movements and trends and even the label of a painter itself, Richter creates a space within which he can move freely and realize his ideas without the burden of preconceived ideology.

“How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it?” Richter once asked. “Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread. Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.” Rather than curse the darkness of chaos, Richter chose to light a candle of form, specifically in the form of a series of paintings of candles such as the one above (from 1982). The rock group Sonic Youth used this painting for the cover of their 1988 album Daydream Nation, perhaps seeing the same longing for form in the photorealist painting that their angst-driven music conveyed.

Mother and Child

That is what you understood: the ripe fruits.
You placed them in bowls there in front of you
and weighed out their heaviness with pigments.
And so you saw women as fruits too,
and saw the children likewise, driven
from inside into the forms of their being.
And you saw yourself in the end as a fruit,
removed yourself from your clothes, brought
yourself in front of the mirror, allowed yourself
within, as far as your gaze that stayed huge outside
and did not say: ‘I am that’: no, rather: ‘this is.’
So your gaze was finally free of curiosity
and so un-possessive, of such real poverty,
it no longer desired self: was sacred.

From Requiem for a Friend by Rainer Maria Rilke

When Max Beckmann told Marie-Louise von Motesiczky that she could one day be Germany’s greatest woman artist since Paula Modersohn-Becker, that was high praise indeed. Born February 8, 1876, Modersohn-Becker brought a female perspective to German Expressionism, especially in her exploration of her own sexuality and role as a mother. In Mother and Child Lying Nude (above, from 1907), Modersohn-Becker paints a woman and child in all rounded fertility, as if they were the “ripe fruits” to which her friend Rainer Maria Rilke alludes to in his requiem to Modersohn-Becker after her death. Artists have depicted the female nude since the beginning of art, but such images from the imagination of a female artist add a whole new dimension, seeing the sexuality from within. Again, to use Rilke’s words, Modersohn-Becker looked at her gender and said not “I am that” but rather “This is,” affirming rather than objectifying her body and it’s procreative power.

Modersohn-Becker painted many portraits, landscapes, and still lifes in her career, but after 1906 she painted a series of self-portraits that redefined both the self-portrait and the nude for female artists. Her Self-Portrait: Half-Naked with Amber Necklace (above, from 1906) shows the artist looking directly at the viewer, adorned with an almost primitive looking amber necklace. This painting inspired Rilke to write the following in his Requiem:

Why do you want me to believe that in the amber beads
at your throat there was still some heaviness
of that heaviness that never exists in the other-side
calm of paintings: why do you show me
an evil presentiment in your stance:
what do the contours of your body mean,
laid out like the lines on a hand,
so that I no longer see them except as fate?

Modersohn-Becker’s nudes lack any sexiness. They’re heavy and monumental, like a statue. Instead of clothes, she wears the assets of her sexuality like accessories, which the necklace accessory itself accentuates. The “contours of her body” that befuddle Rilke become a statement of “fate”—the fate as a woman that Modersohn-Becker does not regret (i.e., sorry that she’s not a man) but rather embraces as a challenge and a blessing.

It’s hard not to look at Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portrait on Her Fifth Wedding Anniversary (above, from 1907) and feel sad. She depicts herself proudly pregnant, her body swelling physically as her soul itself seems to grow larger. Modersohn-Becker gave birth to a daughter, named Mathilde, in November 1907. Less than a month later, Paula Modersohn-Becker died from an embolism. She left behind a long legacy of love and friendship despite the relative shortness of her life and career, inspiring Rilke to write his Requiem a year later and inspiring German and female artists ever since to look within to see their world.

Born Critic

I remember buying as a teen an abridged version of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters in a remainder bin (some of the color plates were missing) and thinking it was the greatest work of art criticism ever. Born February 8, 1819, Ruskin came at the end of the Romantic era and lived through the Victorian age. Watercolors such as his Cascade de la Folie, Chamonix (above, from 1849) demonstate Ruskin’s eye for detail as well as his Romantic heart, searching high in the Swiss Alps for the spiritual as Wordsworth, Shelley, and so many others had done before him. In many ways, Ruskin was the greatest art fan of his age, using his father’s wealth to ingratiate himself into the art world, including the life of J.M.W. Turner. Using his father’s money, Ruskin purchased several Turners. When critics attacked Turner during his evolution into a more abstract artist, Ruskin wrote a fan letter to the artist offering his pen in Turner’s defense. Turner thanked Ruskin and refused his offer, but Ruskin rose to defend Turner throughout Modern Painters and afterwards, holding Turner up as the epitome of the great artist while, unfortunately, denigrating nearly everyone else from Michelangelo to Dürer.

After Turner’s death, Ruskin sought out another painter to champion, preferably a younger artist whom he could mold in the image of his own critical beliefs. When John Everett Millais faced critical attacks for his “blasphemous” painting Christ in the House of his Parents, Ruskin seized the opportunity to take him as his protegy. Ruskin asked Millais to paint his portrait (above, from 1854) surrounded by the natural setting of Scotland, home of his young wife Effie Gray. Ruskin sent Millais out to paint from nature in the company of Effie. Over time, Millais and Effie fell in love, leading to Effie’s request for an annullment from her loveless (and, perhaps, unconsummated) marriage to Ruskin. Ruskin later savagely attacked Millais’ paintings in his quest for revenge.

Ruskin remains a strange figure in the history of art criticism. His attention to detail (as seen in the lecture diagram above, from 1853) and ability to recognize earlier than most the talents of Turner and Millais make him a fascinating even today. Reading Modern Painters as an impressionable youth, I was simply captivated at how he could bring aspects of nature to life, from stones to clouds, with stunning specificity. Today, however, I see the limitations of Ruskin’s thinking more than its value. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell argues in her Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (which I shall review shortly), Ruskin’s dislike of Dutch genre painting goes beyond aesthetics to a dislike of the vulgar, which translates to a dislike of the middle and lower classes. Ruskin reeks of an effete, cold elitism—a recoiling from the human touch in art and, perhaps, in life.

To Make the Horrible Beautiful

Remembering paintings he had seen as a child of “redcoated English soldiers massacring foreigners,” Stanley Donwood writes in Dead Children Playing: A Picture Book featuring the art of Radiohead, he later came to realize that “that’s what [he] wanted to paint; jewels strewn in snow. Somehow I want to MAKE THE HORRIBLE BEAUTIFUL.” Since 1994, Donwood and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke (co-author of Dead Children Playing as his alter ego, Dr. Tchock) have collaborated to create album art for Radiohead albums The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows and Yorke’s solo album The Eraser. This collected body of work represents the greatest assemblage of album art since the iconic album covers of The Beatles in the 1960s.

Donwood created a series of nightmare landscapes that indeed made the horrible beautiful for the album Kid A, including Residential Nemesis (above, from 1999). In such apocalyptic landscapes snow becomes not a blanket that hides but rather a document of the “evidence” of cruelty, a record of the footprints of the oppressor over the oppressed. Later, the repetition of a symbol for a lost child, similar to what you’d see in a shopping mall, turns sinister when set in a whitened landscape of urban highways careening about. Donwood’s art captures the sense of dread and angst at the center of Radiohead’s art. One of the earliest pieces in Dead Children Playing parodies the instructions for an asthma inhaler, replacing the real instructions with steps such as “Scrabble around on the floor trying to find it” and “Realise with terror that it isn’t working.” Donwood’s art conveys this sense of asphyxiation beneath the pressure of modern life. “Since I started drawing little weeping minotaurs, I’ve been trying to find the maze,” Donwood later writes after transforming London in his imagination into a labyrinth of twisted facts and fictions. Like the labyrinth of classical myth, you feel not only little hope of escape but the constant dread of being pursued when looking at these images.

The series of paintings I found most striking were those done for the album Hail to the Thief. Donwood recounts a visit to Los Angeles and his sense of being oppressed by the “very big, and very brash” omnipresent advertising and its relentless repetition of the same basic seven colors. Inspired, Donwood began to paint maps consisting entirely of those same seven colors, beginning with the Pacific Coast (above, from 2003), later moving on to Hollywood, and even later moving on to war-torn cities such as Grozny, Kabul, and Bagdad. In those brash seven colors, Donwood inserts words and phrases onto the landscape, spurring the viewer to make whatever connections he wishes. When the words “Pointless,” “2 + 2 = 5,” “Someone’s Son,” and “Someone’s Daughter” appear over a map of Bagdad, the message of an unjust war based on false arguments waged by the powerful at the expense of the innocent seems quite clear. The power of American hegemony, garishly visible by the trail of media and advertising our culture leaves in its wake, literally rewrites the maps in these paintings. These paintings made me think of William Kentridge’s tapestries currently on exhibition at the PMA. (My review of that catalogue here.) Kentridge uses maps as the backdrop of his tapestries to reject the idea that any landscape, including that of his native South Africa, could somehow be innocent. The imprint of injustice remains no matter what cosmetic treatment is applied. Similarly, Donwood’s repainted maps illustrate the cost of imperialism and the permanent mark it makes not only on the landscape but on the collective psyche of a people.

“Don’t get any big ideas,” one cartoon says near the end of Dead Children Playing. “They’re not going to happen.” The art of Donwood and Radiohead makes the big ideas visible without dogma, allowing the viewer to experience and absorb the concepts for himself. The Beatles had the luxury of the long-playing album sleeve to create their packages, but Donwood and Radiohead exist in the era of the compact disc jewel case. Would Peter Blake’s crowded cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band be as memorable if those famous faces were too small to pour over with the music in the background? Fortunately, Donwood’s art exists and, strangely, thrives in those close confines—a physical manifestation of the claustrophobic feelings they often depict. Dead Children Playing, with its beautiful reproductions and astoundingly affordable price, should help spread those big ideas around and, perhaps, make them happen.


[Many thanks to Verso Books for providing me with a review copy of Dead Children Playing: A Picture Book.]

Carnival of the Animals

Few artists tickle my sense of humor as much as Franz Marc, especially through works such as The Yellow Cow (above, from 1911). Born February 8, 1880, Marc specialized in painting animals of all kinds in unique poses against fantastic backgrounds in one of the more unique personal interpretations of Expressionism. The sight of The Yellow Cow exuberantly leaping across the picture strikes a note of simple, animal joy that precious few Expressionist works hit, thanks mainly to the social strain placed on the collective artistic psyche in the lead-up to World War I. Rather than fall into that same pit of despair, Marc chose to “talk” with the animals, developing a dialogue with the carefree existence of his pets and the more exotic animals he saw in zoos.

Marc, however, was not facile painter of a single emotion. Like so many other German artists right after 1900, Marc fell under the spell of the art and recently translated letters of Vincent van Gogh and sought to add a spiritual aspect to his art through the use of color. I’ve always thought of Marc’s The Tiger (above, from 1911) as a distant cousin to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” in its exploration of the dynamic of beauty and destructive power in a singe living being such as the tiger. With August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky, Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter and exchanged ideas on the philosophy of art with his fellow artists. To make an animal actually appear to think, as I believe Marc does in The Tiger, that artist needs to do a lot of thinking himself.

As World War I seemed more and more inevitable, Marc pondered the fate of the world, but rather than portray people facing the coming storm, he depicted animals in peril in The Fate of the Animals (above, from 1913). Through a series of almost prismatic lines, Marc creates a great sense of tension in The Fate of the Animals. The vibrantly colored animals seemed trapped within the forest, unable to escape their sad fate. Sadly, Marc himself seemed trapped by an inescapable fate. Just after an order had been issued to remove notable artists from combat, including Marc, he was killed by an artillery shell in 1916. Over a short span of just 5 years, Franz Marc created a body of work that showed an entirely new way of looking at Expressionism and a whole new way of thinking about animals and nature and, through them, humanity’s place in the world.

Waking Nightmares

If you know one painting by Henry Fuseli, it’s most likely one of his versions of The Nightmare (above, from 1781). Born February 7, 1741 in Zurich, Switzerland, Fuseli spent his most productive years as an artist in England. Works such as The Nightmare created an instant sensation, ushering in the era of Gothic-tinged Romanticism in painting that would culminate in the works of William Blake and Caspar David Friedrich. Although Fuseli painted works on the cutting edge of his time, he maintained a good relationship with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the embodiment of the British establishment in art, and even joined and later taught at the Royal Academy. Fuseli’s ability to push the envelope while still making the right connections testifies to the quality of his art as much as that of his personality.

Fuseli used his skills to illustrate the fantastic to put pictures to the words of the two writers the Romantic generation held in the highest esteem—John Milton and William Shakespeare. The Romantic poets from Blake to Keats looked to those two figures as the exemplars of what a poet should and could be. Fuseli helped feed that adulation with such images as his Hamlet and His Father’s Ghost (above), which captures the tension of that moment when Hamlet confronts the ghost of his murdered father and questions whether the spirit’s request for revenge is a trap for his own soul. The emphatic gestures and exaggerated musculature of the figures would later inspire Blake, sixteen years younger than Fuseli, to create similar characters based on his own works of literature as well as those of Milton and others.



When I look at Fuseli’s Silence (above, 1801), I can’t help but think of my beloved Blake. The despondent figure looks so much like something out of Blake that it’s easy to forget that Fuseli came first. Fuseli, like Blake, practiced liberal, some would say radical, politics, traveling in intellectual circles that included influential figures such as Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Like so many intellectuals of that generation, Fuseli personally felt pain over the descent of the hopeful French Revolution into the bloodthirsty Reign of Terror. Silence, in some ways, can be seen as Fuseli’s reply to those humanist ideals crushed by tragic reality. Although Fuseli taught many students, including John Constable, Blake remains his most clear descendent. Just through his ability to spark the already fertile imagination of Blake, Fuseli deserves a greater place in art history.