Rough Power

An "expressionist," Max Beckmann painted only what he felt. Generally, he expressed the feeling that life is hot, dark, strange and rough. "I, too," he used to say, nodding his cliff like head, "am rough."

Last week a Manhattan gallery displayed Beckmann's last oils, including a triptych called The Argonauts, which he finished the day before he died (TIME, Jan. 8). The triptych is not so brutally full-blooded as his best, but its heavy-fleshed figures looming against a sunset world of hot & cold colors characterize both the man and his work.

Among the exhibition's better and less ambitious pictures is Dreaming Girl. Outlined with conscious clumsiness, she fairly bulges her canvas. She is weighted with sleep, yet every line betrays a dreamer's restlessness. Her thick legs press together and her feet lock like hands; her head twists sideways as if to avoid the lute that lies across her. The painting clearly suggests the old Greek theme of Leda, with the lute serving as a dark swan. But Beckmann was not the man to labor his expressionism with handy tags and explanations.

Beckmann liked to repeat the familiar mystical idea that the man who penetrates the visible world deeply enough will see the invisible. That belief led him to produce richly symbolic art, which struck the Nazis as "degenerate." They hounded him from his native Germany to Amsterdam, where he painted in hiding throughout the war. In 1947, when he was 63, Beckmann came to the U.S. to teach--first at St. Louis' Washington University and later at the Brooklyn Museum School. He urged his students to paint from the heart, yet never hesitated to correct their efforts with a loaded brush and firm, heavy hand.

His students have not yet matured enough to influence U.S. art, but such established American painters as Jack Levine and Philip Guston demonstrate in their work the weight of Beckmann's example. The 100-odd Beckmanns now in U.S. collections are proofs of his rough strength, show the continued power of expressionism as a philosophy of art.

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