Max Beckmann: retrospective.

THIS LAVISHLY illustrated collection of 12 scholarly essays by German and American authors, with a catalogue of Beckmann's 636 paintings, drawings, and prints, celebrates the centenary exhibition of one of the greatest modern painters at museums in Munich, Berlin, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Most of the essays are badly written, boring, an d banal, though the ones on the War, the city, Amsterdam, and America are illuminating.

Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884, studied in Weimar and Paris, was a medical orderly in a typhus hospital and in an operating room in Belgium during the Great War, suffered a nervous breakdown, worked in Berlin and taught in Frankfurt, married twice, spent the Hitler years in Amsterdam (where he used bedsheets as canvas, and lived half underground, half tolerated by the German authorities), experienced a triumphant resurrection and public acclaim in America ("the last sensation--except death--which life could offer") and died of a heart attack in New York in 1950.

Like the satiric drawings of George Grosz and the morbid poems of Gottfried Benn, Beckmann's vision was nourished by the brutality of our time. Beckmann commented intelligently on his technique and ideas, wrote bitterly of "the defective invention called 'Life,'" and exclaimed: "In my paintings I confront God with all He has done wrong. My religion is arrogance before God, defiance of God. Defiance, because He created us so that we cannot love ourselves." Yet he also saw that the horrors of war could heighten aesthetic awareness and inspire great art: "When a large shellburst flies past it's as though the gates of eternity had been ripped open. Everything suggests space, distance, infinity."

Beckmann has a great deal in common with his English contemporary, Wyndham Lewis, who also spent the war years in exile and worked in St. Louis. Both did great paintings of the war and the modern city. Beckmann's The Night (1919), locked up "in sharp lines and planes, clear as glass," reflects the postwar chaos in the brutal torture of a family. In his Synagogue in Frankfurt (1919), the house of worship "tilts backward, the houses sway and slide into one another, the lampposts stagger, the globe lights are suspended in mid air. Everything is held in a crystalline numbness."

Both Beckmann and Lewis executed a brilliant series of urbane and anguished portraits of their inspiring, idealized wives (the best one is Beckmann's Quappi in Blue and Grey, 1944) and of themselves. Beckmann's Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) transforms his huge bald head, wide nose, flat face, and protruding jaw--a cross between Winston Churchill and a bulldog--into a brutal and aggressively self-assured pose--part revelation, part disguise. Both Beckmann and Lewis are superb draftsmen whose forceful, jagged outlines convey chilling, cynical, ironic detachment as well as ferocious energy and psyschic power. It is these paintings by Beckmann, rather than this nine massive triptychs, that constitute his greatest work.

In St. Louis in 1947 Beckmann resumed the teaching he had been forced to give up in Frankfurt in 1933. At Mills College in Califorina his class model, abandoning the classic beauxarts poses, became a nude in a Beckmann painting: "wearing purple high-heeled shoes, lying on her back on a red velvet sofa, propping up her legs against the back and smoking a cigarette."

At the University of Colorado in the summer of 1949 (I have found), the students were awestruck by the world-famous figure whose paintings were exhibited in the gallery and whose teaching inspired them to fulfill his high expectations. He taught for three hours in the morning in a hot top-floor studio in the theater building, and would grab the brush and paint with black on the students' canvases. He pretended he had no English and had his wife translate for him, so he could meet the students on his own terms and maintain the necessary distance. But he could and did speak English, when he felt like it, on social occasions.

In her novel Henry and Cato, Iris Murdoch describes Beckmann's place in the tradition of "metaphysical objectivity." Henry admires the painter's vast self-confidence and commanding egoism, and is writing a book on the tormented images of the "two-wived Beckmann, treading underground paths of masculine mysticism which linked Signorelli to Grunewald, Rembrandt to Cezanne.