Contribution to Book
Figuring Redemption: Christianity and Modernity in Max Beckmann's Resurrections
ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art
(2014)
Abstract
Traditional methodologies of art history – such as formalism, iconography, and biography – have generated a sizable literature on the modern painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Frequently employed in cooperation, such methods have been applied hermeneutically to account for what his pictures might mean and why they look the way they do. Yet they have thus far failed to account for the persistence of religious, specifically Christian imagery in the artist’s oeuvre. Beckmann’s ambitious, but largely overlooked Resurrection paintings from 1908-1909 and 1916-1918 raise questions about the limits of traditional methodologies. They also raise questions about the limits of an enduring modernist understanding of figuration as regressive and ideologically reactionary. This paper reconsiders the Resurrection paintings by employing traditional methodologies heuristically in an analysis of the aesthetic discourse within which these paintings were created and received. It also attempts to claim for Beckmann – as a figurative painter of Christian motifs – a position of radical autonomy in modern art history. The first Resurrection debuted in 1909 when it received tepid critical reviews in the Berlin Secession exhibition. Beckmann revisited the subject again in 1916, this time on a canvas that he never completed, but thereafter kept constantly on view in his studio. These ostensibly failed attempts at figuring redemption affirm received ideas about the triumph of abstraction as a core tenant of avant-garde aesthetic values. His figurative language – Rubensian in the first Resurrection and indebted to Grünewald in the second – appeared wildly out of step with the pictorial innovations of his contemporaries such as Kandinsky and Picasso. Closer examination of these two paintings, in tandem with the historical frameworks in which they were conceived, suggests another narrative, however, that hinges on the concept of redemption. Beckmann’s understanding of this concept was ultimately rooted in the creative process (he famously declared in his 1941 diary that “Creation is redemption!”), but early in his career he viewed it through and against a Schopenhauerian lens. Beckmann’s annotated copy of The World as Will and Representation reveals his tete-à-tete with Arthur Schopenhauer, who understood art – especially history paintings of religious subjects – as a viable escape from the chaos and pain of modern reality. Beckmann’s affirmation of this belief is evident in his first Resurrection, which stresses a transcendent and vertical flight from the vagaries of modern life in Wilhelmine Berlin that is nonetheless at odds with the painterly physicality of his figurative style. It was not until the second Resurrection, however, that he stridently parted ways with this anachronistic visualization of redemption. Inspired by his traumatic tours on the Eastern and Western Fronts in WWI, the unfinished canvas depicts a spiritual wasteland on a horizontal axis littered with attenuated and thinly rendered bodies. Gustav Hartlaub, who was the Deputy Director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle at the time, perceived in this painting a “formal asceticism” in both its style and sensibility. Rendered in an austere figurative language, this unfinished canvas became the touchstone for many of Beckmann’s subsequent and major artworks.
Keywords
- Max Beckmann,
- modernity,
- christianity,
- redemption,
- resurrection,
- art history
Disciplines
Publication Date
May 20, 2014
Editor
James Romaine and Linda Stratford
Publisher
Cascade Books
Series
Art for Faith's Sake
ISBN
978-1620320846
Citation Information
Amy K Hamlin. "Figuring Redemption: Christianity and Modernity in Max Beckmann's Resurrections" ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art (2014) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/akhamlin/10/