Chicago's Max

Max Beckmann, Germany's greatest living artist (before Hitler), was packing to leave Holland, teach at the Chicago Art Institute, when invasion swallowed him in the spring of 1940. Last week, Chicago gave missing Max Beckmann his biggest one-man show in the U.S., at the plush-lined, modern-art-conscious Arts Club.

Painted with broad brushwork reminiscent of Georges Rouault's (TIME, Nov. 25, 1940), the show's 58 pictures depicted shadowy landscapes, sprawling human figures colored with the dull sheen of cast iron and stove polish. Weird, mystical canvases, as big as murals, showed mind-wrecking concepts like birth and death. Many, obscurely symbolic, writhed with brilliantly colored male and female figures, with fish and anthropomorphic bric-a-brac in a Freudian Walpurgisnacht.

Three years as a male nurse in a German ambulance corps during the last war turned Painter Beckmann's mind to religious subjects, and for several years he painted dour Christs, saints and martyrs. An avid reader of Schopenhauer and other German philosophers, he found his own fantastically mystical style in the 19203, found also a ready market for his work in the salons of democratic Germany.

An Aryan, Beckmann was unmolested by the Nazis' first cultural purges. But when, in 1935, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. presented a Beckmann, depicting a family of grotesque, square-headed Germans (see cut), to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, the Nazi pundits suddenly got hopping mad. Wailed they: "Does [Mrs. Rockefeller] take us for such stupids [as the painting portrays] or does she take New Yorkers for such stupids that she hangs this up as a little bit of Germany?" In 1937 Beckmann moved with his round-faced, good-looking and good-cooking wife, "Quappi," to Holland. Says he: "Life is difficult, as perhaps everyone knows by now. It is to escape from these difficulties that I practice the pleasant profession of a painter."

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