MAX BECKMANN Beginning

“What’s going on?” is the normal reaction because the first thing that hits you in a Max Beckmann painting is the urgency of the message. Each panel is like a box crowded with foreigners, images both symbolic and narrative, struggling to tell their side of the story. The hasty black outline seems made by a pen that has run out of words. This painting is so provocative that one runs across the painted ground and dives headlong into the waters of interpretation. For me Beginning is about male childhood cursed by a culture that worships heroic youth and ignores anyone past forty-five.

The right panel depicts school with its many paths: the philosopher’s head, the lyrical harp, the international globe and the lead pupil holding up a hopeful drawing of yellow hills. However, our student considers school a jail he hopes to escape by showing off a sketch of his own erotic fantasy while his teacher scowls helplessly.

The darker left panel shows the boy’s imagination at work: he wants to be king but he turns away from the pretty playmate, who would be his queen and whose mirror reflects the burning candle of life. Instead he is captivated by a hero’s death, to be carried away by beautiful angels as sung about by the creepy, blind, and crippled organ grinder outside his window. Now-a-days it would be TV and movies.

In the middle panel the boy chooses his path: to be a soldier carried forward on a fake white horse of false ideals, revenge disguised as patriotism, greed dressed as democracy. His parents beg him to climb a more spiritual ladder but he hangs his nursery rhymes upside down. He wants a woman of the night, naked from the waist down and smoking the pipe of opium dreams. Luring him on is the organ grinder (an apt name), this time in a clowns outfit, meaning the joke is on our hero, and holding the black mirror reflecting death. Which brings us to the old woman at the center of this painting. She is the future and she is reading a letter, a letter that says her child is being shipped home in a coffin – or he is the soldier with his leg shot off, the beer bellied bore drinking every night, or the father helplessly watching his son, who only hears the organ grinder’s promise of heaven. He was the boy who never thought that after his mid-life crash he would hobble along for another forty years, old and weak like his teacher, stodgy and un-sexy like his dad, to his ordinary death.

The feeling Beckmann often leaves me with is pain, but it’s the pain of understanding along with the beauty that you might interpret it completely differently, all of which makes for a very mysterious and great painting.

Artillery Magazine Vol 1 no. 1 September 2006