awn: Imam-d.
:0 “WWW;
l.

I

nun.

.. a. .9
1%.... ......

{Bk

3.... 7.
. :13: . a
.2 .r»

in 54.9.1:
SEVEN»
.. 3 I 1

1. mi. 21.: .
5.... .1315
7 f?

a. . . ,
:i. .1.
:17: .

83.1.»...msu.

J
I; .l .. .(I .v.)t..~
.0”! o‘ . 7115;: 2.1-; 1

(I

.5

fits. #1
ll? 3)..

{K . K’s: 0..

.1!)I.1 \L..f4|7
3-. :7 4. 6... 1':
0.2.; 5.3...)

 

15% 11 1 f1:

11...}. .

. .2
#213'1IJAA .1) ) ...
2.... 5.210.... o 1

I... 4

mews

0er I7» lIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

050 7915

 

”LIBRARY

Mlcmgan State
Unlversity

 

 

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

MAX BECKMANN'S TRAPEZE

presented by

Michael Comstock Dooley

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M. A. Art History
degree in

/'\'aw&\v(
’ Una-0,313.1)”.

Phylis Fl yd

 

 

 

Date November 5, 1996

 

0-7639 MS U i: an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

PLACE ll RETURN BOX to rornovo this chockout from your rocord.
To AVOID FINES roturn on or bdoro doto duo.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU In An Affirmative Action/Emil Opportunity III-titular!
W

ulna-9.1

 

MAX BECKMANN'S "TRAPEZE"
By

Michael Comstock Dooley

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Art

1996

ABSTRACT
MAX BECKMANN‘S "TRAPEZE"
By

Michael Comstock Dooley

In this thesis I analyze Max Beckmann's painting of 1923, Trapeze, with
simultaneous regard to the artist's three most important philosophical/religious sources
from his post-World War I period: the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Helena P.
Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, and the religion of Gnosticism. In addition, I outline
Germany's socio—economic, political and cultural circumstances of the early 1920s,
indicating the ways Trapeze reflects that environment.

At times my methodology is iconographica], finding direct correlations in the
painting to specific tenets of the various systems of thought. I also construct a general
picture of how Beckmann viewed his relationship to the world, indicating the ways
Trapeze manifests this view with its synthesis of Schopenhauer, Blavatsky and
Gnosticism. I conclude that Trapeze not only effectively documents a pivotal time in
the artist's spiritual journey, but is an artistic object distinctly born of the Weimar

Republic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first gratitude must be to Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, whose grace
has always been sufficient, no less so during the present project than for so many
other occasions.

My thanks also to Professor Phylis Floyd for never wavering in her
standards. I am unquestionably a better writer as a result of her critiques, a lasting gift
indeed.

Thank you to Professor William G. Kilboume for his ongoing input as well,
but especially for his ready availability and his well-timed encouragements to my

academic career generally.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ....................................... v

INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1

CHAPTER 1

”TRAPEZE" IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SITUATION . . . 7

CHAPTER 2

"TRAPEZE" IN THE CONTEXT OF WEIMAR REPUBLIC CULTURE ..... l6
Varieté ......................................... 16
Circus and Varieté Motifs in German Art .................... 18
Art Criticism during the Weimar Republic .................... 25
Religion in the Weimar Republic .......................... 37

CHAPTER 3

PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF "TRAPEZE" ......... 42
Schopenhauer ..................................... 43
Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine ..................... 50
Gnosticism ....................................... 55

CONCLUSION ........................................ 59

APPENDIX A

FIGURES ............................................ 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................... 99

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure l - Max Beckmann, Trapeze, 1923, oil on canvas. Toledo, Toledo Museum of

Art ................................................ 64
Figure 2 - Beckmann, Martyrdom, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph . . . . 65
Figure 3 - Beckmann, The Holdouts, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph
................................................... 66
Figure 4 - Beckmann, The Ideologues, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph
................................................... 67
Figure 5 - Beckmann, Hunger, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph ...... 68
Figure 6 - Beckmann, The Way Home, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph
................................................... 69
Figure 7 - Beckmann, The Street, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph . . . . 70
Figure 8 - Beckmann, The Night, 1918, oil on canvas. Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein—Westfalen ..................................... 7 1
Figure 9 - Beckmann, Carnival, 1920, oil on canvas. London, Tate Gallery . . . . 72

Figure 10 - Beckmann, The Dream, 1921, oil on canvas. St. Louis, Saint Louis Art
Museum ............................................. 73

Figure 11 - Beckmann, Dance in Baden-Baden, 1923, oil on canvas. Munich,
Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst ........ 74

Figure 12 - Erich Heckel, Four Female Dancers in Black, Dresden, 1911, pen and
colored pencil. Hamburg, Altonaer Museum ....................... 75

Figure 13 - Ludwig Kirchner, Female Variete’ Dancers, 1909, India ink and colored
crayon. Hamburg, Altonaer Museum ............................ 76

Figure 14 - Kirchner, Panama GirLs, 1910, oil on canvas. Raleigh, North Carolina

Museum of Art, Wilhelm R. Valentiner Collection ................... 77

Figure 15 — Paul Kleinschmidt, Dressing Room, 1929, oil on canvas. Ulmer, Ulmer
Museum ............................................. 78

Figure 16 - Kleinschmidt, Theater Dressing Room, 1930, oil on canvas. Stuttgart,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart ..................................... 79

Figure 17 - Kleinschmidt, Large Female Circus Rider, 1927, oil on canvas. Private
Collection ............................................ 80

Figure 18 - Kleinschmidt, Small Female Circus Rider, 1927, oil on canvas. Stuttgart,

Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart .................................. 81
Figure 19 - Kleinschmidt, Coffee Concert, 1925, oil on canvas. Regensburg,
Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg .............................. 82
Figure 20 - Beckmann, The Barker, from the portfolio The Yearly Fair, drypoint,
1921 ............................................... 83
Figure 21 - Georg Tappert, Can-Can, 1911, oil on canvas .............. 84
Figure 22 - Tappert, Two Female Dancers, 1914, oil on canvas ........... 85
Figure 23 - Tappert, The Negress Nyassa with Conch Shell, 1929, oil on canvas
................................................... 86
Figure 24 - Tappert, Young Acrobat Woman, 1928, oil on canvas .......... 87
Figure 25 - Karl Hofer, The Brothers, 1921, oil on canvas. Gelsenkirchen, Stadtisches
Museum Gelsenkirchen .................................... 88
Figure 26 - Beckmann, Self-Portrait as a Clown, 1921, oil on canvas. Wuppertal,
Von der Heydt-Museum der Stadt Wuppertal ....................... 89
Figure 27 - Hofer, Circus People, 1921, oil on canvas. Private Collection ..... 90

Figure 28 - Hofer, Tiller Girls, 1923, oil on canvas. Emden, Kunsthalle Emden,
Stiftung Henri Nannen .................................... 91

vi

Figure 29 - Beckmann, Descent from the Cross, 1917, oil on canvas. New York,

Museum of Modern Art ................................... 92
Figure 30 - Beckmann, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1917, oil on canvas.
St. Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum ............................ 93
Figure 31 - Beckmann, Family Picture, 1920, oil on canvas. New York, Museum of

Modern Art ........................................... 94
Figure 32 - Beckmann, Adam and Eve, 1917, drypoint ................. 95

Figure 33 - Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Red Scarf, 1917, oil on canvas. Stuttgart,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart ..................................... 96

Figure 34 - Beckmann, Mardi-Gras, 1925, oil on canvas. Mannheim, Stadtische
Kunsthalle Mannheim ..................................... 97

Figure 35 - Beckmann, The Barge, 1926, oil on canvas. Bedford, New York, Mr. and
Mrs. Richard L. Feigen ................................... 98

vii

INTRODUCTION

Max Beckmann completed his painting Trapeze (Figure 1) during one of
twentieth-century Germany's most turbulent periods. Still devastated from the defeat
of World War I, caught up in the shrill and frequently bloody contention between the
many extremist political parties, and suffering incomprehensible economic plight,
many in the newly born German Republic experienced daily a grim struggle for mere
existence.

Contemporary artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix created savage
caricatures of the social and political injustices they perceived. The critics often
deemed such unflinching realism, especially when coupled with a certain philosophical
or spiritual emotionalism, to be quintessentially German in character. Beckmann, an
unflagging advocate of the objective in art with little regard for the abstractions of the
Parisians, Russians or Italians, personified this aesthetic. ”I believe in Germany," he
told the publisher Reinhard Piper, "because I believe in myself. I see myself as a
German through and through."1 The art critic Wilhelm Hausenstein echoed this
evaluation in a 1924 monograph on the artist: ”The Gothic identity in Beckmann's

work is indeed a German identity. If I imagine today a specific German art, it is

 

‘Reinhard Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger: Vonnittag-Nachmittag (Munich: R.
Piper Verlag, 1964), 330.

called Beckmann."2

Like so many of his non-German counterparts in the modern art world,
however, Beckmann believed himself gifted with special insight into the nature of the
world, God and life, and felt it his duty as an artist to bring his insight to humanity at
large. Thus he might free his fellows from their pointless suffering. He was not often
meek in his missionary role, nor were his goals humble. ”We still have 20 years or
more to set mankind before a new reality," he wrote in 1932 to his dealer, I.B.
Neumann. ”Right now we are needed more than ever, and I will force men again to
art-~for their own salvation."3 In the aftermath of World War I, Beckmann urged his
fellow artists to devote themselves to "poor, deceived humanity." This the artist
should do, he said, "In order that we can give humanity a picture of its fate, and that

can only be done if we love them." Trapeze is an example of such evangelism.

My primary purpose in this essay is to examine a single Beckmann
painting, seeking to demonstrate specific and concrete ways the work manifests
Beckmann's close study of three worldviews: the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer,
Helena P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, and the tenets of Gnosticism. At times my

methodology is strictly iconographical, as for example when I connect the wheel motif

 

2Wilhelm Hausenstein, ”Max Beckmann," in Wilhelm Fraenger et al., Max
Beckmann (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1924), 69.

3Max Beckmann to I. B. Neumann, 3 January 1932, in Klaus Gallwitz et al., Max
Beckmann: Frankfurt 1915-1933: eine Ausstellung zum 100. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am
Main: Stadtische Galerie im Stadelschen Kunstinstitut, 1983), 284.

‘Max Beckmann in "Schopferische Konfession," Tribune der Kunst und Zeit, no.
13 (1920): 64.

3

in Trapeze to concepts of bondage in the three philosophies. In other cases I suggest
why given concepts in Schopenhauer, Blavatsky or Gnosticism would naturally appeal
to Beckmann's general weltanschauung, and would also validate and reinforce his
general artistic approach, even if we find no direct iconographic correspondences. An
example would be the discussion of Schopenhauer, Beckmann and objective art. In
these and all cases, however, my aim is always to point to specific aspects of the
object which indicate these influences. Wherever possible, I also show the interaction
and commonalities between the three schools of thought as displayed in Trapeze. I
hope to illuminate for the reader the painting's richly-layered and particularly lucid
expression of the artist's postwar spiritual explorations.

I will also endeavor in this essay to place Trapeze squarely within the
context of Weimar Republic society and culture. To this end I make use not only of
contemporaneous accounts of postwar Germany, but particularly of contemporaneous
art criticism. I thus present here, to the best of my knowledge, the first survey of
Beckmann's Weimar Republic critics and possibly of any period. I base this approach
on the idea--which would no doubt be readily embraced by the Berlin critics-that
Trapeze, painted by the thoroughly German Max Beckmann, might transmit certain
messages that resonate truly only for those caught up in that country's tumultuous and
intoxicated times. Above all, of course, I want to establish Trapeze as an authentic
child of postwar, Golden Twenties Germany.

Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy is acknowledged nearly universally
among Beckmann scholars for its importance to the painter's view. I-Iildegard Zenser,

Hans Belting, Friedhelm Fischer and particularly Margot Clark make fruitful

4
observations on Schopenhauer's relationship to Beckmann's art, though all limit

themselves mainly to one particular aspect or another of Schopenhauer's thought.’

The majority of Beckmann scholarship since the 1950s attempts to unravel
the artist's dense and perplexing iconography. Fischer has been one of the most
ambitious; his Max Beckmann: Symbol and Worldview both analyzes specific works
throughout the artist's career and attempts an encyclopedic survey of Beckmann's
myriad individual motifs and symbols. Charles Kessler's book on the triptychs also
accents iconographical analyses of the works.6 Belting looks at Beckmann's works
iconographically by genre.

These authors and others necessarily concentrate on Beckmann's eclectic
and far-ranging philosophic and religious interests. Clark, for example, is well-versed
in the influence of Theosophy, Gnosticism and other ”Hermetic" or esoteric religious
systems on Beckmann's art. Sarah O'Brien Twohig's monograph on Carnival presents

a Gnostic iconographical interpretation for that work as well.7

 

sHildegard Zenser, ”Das 'Ich' als groBtes Geheimnis des Lebens," Weltkunst 60 (1
November 1990): 3556-3561; Hans Belting, Max Beckmann (New York:

Timken, 1989); Friedhelm Fischer, Max Beckmann: Symbol and Weltbild: Grundrifl
zu einer Deutung des Gesamtwerkes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972); Margot
Orthwein Clark, Max Beckmann: Sources of Imagery in the Hermetic Tradition (Ph.D.
diss., Washington University, 1975); and Clark, "Beckmann's Abbilder des
metaphysischen 'Selbst' ," in Max Beckmann: Frankfurt 1915—1933: Eine Ausstellung
zum 100. Geburtstag, eds. Klaus Gallwitz, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Stadische
Galerie im Stadelschen Kunstinstitut, 1983).

“Charles Kessler, Max Beckmann's T riptychs (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1970).

7Sarah O'Brien Twohig, Beckmann: "Carnival" (London: Tate Gallery, 1984).

5

The least-used approach is to place Beckmann's art within the context of
the contemporary society. Most authors make only passing references to the conditions
of Germany during Beckmann's production (before he fled to Amsterdam in 1936).
Matthias Eberle is an exception, giving a thorough account of Beckmann's experiences
in World War I and in the immediate postwar environment, relating all to Beckmann's
subjects and meanings.8

What I believe is unique to my approach is the bringing of all four of
these areas of inquiry--the spiritual/philosophical systems and the social context--to
bear on a single work. Rarely have I found any one of these aspects, let alone all
four, investigated exhaustively, point by point, per specific details in the work. Ingrid
Schulze, for example, has provocative ideas about male and female principles in
Beckmann's art, but makes no reference to Blavatsky, Gnosticism or any other
metaphysical system.9 The writing most closely resembling my own monograph is
Twohig's booklet on the painting Carnival. Carnival was painted just two years before
Trapeze, but Twohig only briefly sketches the bewildering times in Germany. Her
Gnostic analysis of Carnival is enlightening, but Blavatsky is left out altogether.
Though many have delved into Beckmann's spiritual/philosophical sources, only Clark
spends considerable time on Schopenhauer as well. But Clark covers all of

Beckmann's career, as do most, and gives no attention to the social and political

 

‘Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann,
Schlemmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

9Ingrid Schulze, ”Jahrmarkt—Metapher, Tiersatire und 'verkehrte Welt' bei Max
Beckmann,” Bildende Kunst, no. 4 (1989): 35-37; "Zirkus, Karussell und Schaubude:
Ein Beitrag zu Max Beckmanns Graphikmappe Der Jahrmarkt,” Bildende Kunst, no. 8
(1990): 60-63.

6

context of the postwar period and how that might affect those works. This is basically
true of Kessler, as well, who considers only the triptychs, and‘hence none of works of
the 1920s. Covering an entire career, of course, tends to move the analysis toward the
more general. The usual trend is to discuss Beckmann's worldview in detail, and its

manifestation in the objects only broadly.lo

 

loAt relevant points in the essay I present other authors' standpoints in more detail.

Chapter 1
'TRAPEZE" IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SITUATION

Max Beckmann began Trapeze on 1 April 1922, completing it more than a
year later on 16 May 1923.“ At the time of T rapeze's creation, German society was
in chaos. The Treaty of Versailles following World War I held Germany completely
responsible "for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated
Governments and their nationals [had] been subjected as a consequence of the war
imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."12 The Allies
imposed reparation payments on Germany of 132 billion gold marks, along with
extreme penalties on German trade.l3 On the pretense of late payments of these

reparations, the French Army occupied Germany's industrial Ruhr section, further

 

”Max Beckmann, ”List of Works (M8)" (Frankfurt: 1923), quoted in
documentation sheet for Trapeze (acc. no. 83.20), Toledo Museum of Art, 1983,
photocopy. Beckmann wrote the publisher Reinhard Piper on 17 May 1923 that the
painting was complete and that it ought to be included in the Beckmann monograph
Piper was to publish the following year (Max Beckmann to Reinhard Piper, Frankfurt,
17 April 1923, Max Beclonann: Briefe, ed. Klaus Gallwitz et al. [Munichz Piper,
1993], 1:238).

12The Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany,
Part VIII, sec. 1, art. 231 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1919), quoted in
Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 8.

l3Erich Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic, tran. Harlan P. Hanson and
Robert G. L. Waite (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 180.

7

8
weakening an already reeling economy.“ Late in 1923, the year Trapeze was
completed, the rate of exchange for the mark--4.2 to the US dollar before the
war-—reached an astonishing low of 4.2 trillion per dollar. 1’ Prices would sometimes
rise one hundredfold in a single day.16
With the economic state of the nation in disarray, the overwhelming
hardships led to a seeming emotional and spiritual collapse as well. Typical of
outsiders visiting Germany, George Brandes, writing for New Republic, observed:
Thinking people in Germany are on the verge of despondency, while the masses
are becoming completely demoralized. . . . The German Republic stands in
great danger of being swept by hunger revolutions, plundering and confiscation
of property; it is threatened with economic and political chaos, followed by
brutal reaction.l7
Langdon Mitchell reported a people "on short ration, mentally distressed, and living
from hand to mouth; a people terribly shattered, terribly demoralized"." An account
in a Berlin newspaper describes the day to day reality of the rampant inflation:
It pounds daily on the nerves: the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future,
today, and tomorrow become doubtful once more overnight. An epidemic of

fear, naked need: lines of shoppers, long since an unaccustomed sight, once
more form in front of shops, first in front of one, then in front of all."

 

l‘Louis L. Snyder, The Weimar Republic: A History of Germany from Ebert to
Hitler (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1966), 51-53.

"Ibid., 53-54.

l“Ibid.

l7George Brandes, "Germany Today,” New Republic (11 November 1922): 88.
"Langdon Mitchell, ”Germany," Atlantic Monthly (April 1923): 541.

l"Friedrich Kroner, ”Uberreizte Nerven,” Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 26 August
1923, quoted in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 63.

9

In his autobiography, Leo Lania calls the winter of 1922 "days of madness."’°

In those months the people of Berlin did not sleep well. Fear of the uncertain

kept them awake, no one could stay at home. It was a mood of paralysis

combined with unrest: you were dead tired and at the same time wide awake.

All human relations were dissolved, life had become an incomprehensible

muddle of numbers, and no one had the strength left to figure out their

meaning.21

The situation spawned debilitating political splintering as well in the

already fragile Weimar Republic. The founding assembly of the Weimar Republic, in
office as Beckmann painted Trapeze, contained representatives from five major parties
as well as an assortment of independents and lesser parties.22 Among the many small
extremist parties that arose was the infant National Socialist German Workers Party,
whose founder Adolph Hitler led its infamous ”Beer Hall Putsch" against the republic
the year Trapeze was completed.23 Since the war's end Germany had endured
revolutions, coup attempts and assassinations." One writer of the time documented
376 politically motivated murders in the republic between 1918 and 1922, mostly

committed by the right."

To a certain extent, Trapeze is a metaphor for the disorder of 19203

 

20Leo Lania, Today We Are Brothers: The Biography of a Generation (Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1942), 211.

21Ibid., 215.

22Snyder, 34.

23Ibid., 57-59.

2‘Ibid., chaps. 2,3 and 5.

2“Emil Julius Gumbel, Vrer Jahre politischer Mord (Berlin: Verlag der neuen
Gesellschaft, 1922), quoted in Kaes, Jay and Dimendberg, 101.

10

German society. Instead ofa dazzling, energetic display of agility and movement,
Beckmann shows us acrobats in a configuration too confining for their performance.
Their expressions are sad and beleagured, and they seem to take no notice of each
other. Rather than cheerful cohesion, we see disillusion and disjunction. In this sense,
then, the painting may reflect the Weimar Republic.

The critics of Beckmann's day focused on the zeitgeist in his work more
commonly than do recent authors. This is the simplest approach, to see the postwar
paintings as mirrors of the turbulent Weimar Republic. Since the 19505, critics
primarily examine Beckmann's philosophical and religious sources and their purpose
in the works, though most acknowledge some degree of social commentary as well.
Charles S. Kessler, for example, analyzes only Beckmann’s triptychs, of which the
earliest is 1933, but refers to the carnival pictures of the 19203, including Trapeze, as
”satirical commentaries on a time out of joint."26 Peter Selz notes the artist ”certainly
engaged in social criticism" in the postwar years, but tells us Beckmann‘s personal
symbolism takes the pictures ”far beyond Verist reportage and social comment. "27
Hans Belting writes that Beckmann holds a mirror to Weimar society, directly at first
and then in circus and theater metaphor." The most direct statement is made by
Friedhelm Fischer:

Around 1918/19 protest is an essential motivating force behind Max Beckmann's

art. This protest does not, however, refer to any sort of social or political
circumstances, it sets itself against God and is therefore characterized as a

 

2‘SKessler, 3, 67.
27Peter Selz, Max Beckmann (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 39.
28Belting, 59.

11
religious phenomenon.”
Beckmann did have a political awareness as well as a sensitivity to the
plight of people around him. In 1920 he contributed to "Creative Credo,” a collection
of essays in which contemporary artists explained their purpose and motivation. In one
excerpt, Beckmann demonstrates concern for the state of affairs in Germany:
We are most certainly facing a difficult time. Yet right now I have the
urge even more than before the war to remain in society. In the city. Right here
is our place now. We must share in all the suffering that will come. We must
abandon our heart and nerves to the horrifying cries of pain of poor, deceived
humanity.30
0n Beckmann's political awareness, Hausenstein wrote in 1924,

It should be explained here, that Beckmann is a kind of political radical. He

believes in socialism. He believes in progress through socialism. . . . About

these perspectives we used to argue in a friendly way by twos, threes, fours.31
We must note, however, Beckmann's opening declaration in his 1938 lecture at the
New Burlington Galleries in London: "I would like to emphasize that I have never
been politically active in any way."32 There is little in his biography to indicate
otherwise was true of the artist's life. This does not preclude, however, the
contemporary political situation as a subject for his art.

The 1919 graphic portfolio, Hell, for example, has contemporary social

and political subjects. Martyrdom (Figure 2) portrays the January assassination of Rosa

 

2"Fischer, 19.
30Beckmann, ”Schopferische Konfession,” 63-64.
31Hausenstein, ”Max Beckmann,” 30.

32Beckmann, "On My Painting," in Stephen Lackner, Max Beckmann: Memories of
a Friendship (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press), 45.

12

Luxemberg, leader of the Marxist revolutionary ”Sparticists.” Beckmann positions her
body to suggest the Deposition of Christ. The Holdouts (Figure 3) shows partisans of
the failed Sparatacist revolt still waging a gun battle from their loft, while in The
Ideologues (Figure 4) leading leftist thinkers hold an imaginary meeting."3 Barbara
Buenger has convincingly identified these figures as, among others, Max Herrmann-
NeiBe, the leading Weimar Republic theater critic, who wrote Marxist pamphlets in
1919; pacifist writer Annette Kolb; art critic Carl Einstein, arrested briefly for
supporting the Sparticists; and novelist Heinrich Mann, who supported socialist
revolutionary causes but preferred above all a revolution of geist.34

Focusing more on social conditions, the print Hunger (Figure 5) movingly
portrays a starving family saying grace over a single bowl of food. Both The Way
Home (Figure 6) and The Street (Figure 7) feature severely handicapped war veterans
begging, a topic that other artists such as Grosz and Dix covered with brutal
directness.

In form, the compostion of Trapeze can be seen as a metaphor for the
political instability and social alienation of early 19203 Germany. Beckmann places his
figures in stifling proximity to each other, yet there is no emotional contact between
them at all. Not one of these melancholy characters looks at another. It is as if they

are trapped in their own individual realities, reminding us of Lania's observation that

 

33From December 1918 to January 1919, a number of armed conflicts took place
in the streets of Berlin between the Sparticists and government troops, which included
ad-hoc freikorps composed of displaced WW I veterans and the unemployed. Many
freikorps participants later became Nazi storm troopers. See Snyder, 28—32.

3‘Barbara Buenger, "Max Beckmann's Ideologues: Some Forgotten Faces," Art
Bulletin 71 (September, 1989): 453—479.

13
"all human relations were dissolved." Certainly the "mood of paralysis" Lania
describes is an apt characterization of Trapeze. A number of Beckmann’s paintings
from these years exhibit claustrophobic gatherings of figures in cramped picture fields,
such as The Night (Figure 8) Carnival (Figure 9), The Dream (Figure 10), and Dance
in Baden-Baden (Figure 11). As in Trapeze, no figure in these paintings meets the
gaze of another, but instead looks off into a space beyond the picture frame."5
The physiognomy of Trapeze's figures, as well, seems perfectly captured
in Mitchell's observation of Germany in 1922 that "apart from profiteers, the people
on the street looked either anxious, or sour and embittered, or listless, or abstracted,
or in a dull despair.”5
The paralysis of T rapeze's acrobats may also suggest the infant German
Republic's chaotic political environment of revolutions, putsches and assassinations. A
passage in Living Age from 1922 observes:
The difficulty of making a living, the instability of values and with them of
moral standards, the distress begotten of defeat and revolution have made every
German the competitor, the adversary, and almost the enemy of every other
German. We encounter this trait in domestic politics, where it is very marked. It
also manifests itself prominently in all community relations. . . . Every man
goes his own way.37
The Weimar Republic critics, on whom the conditions of the day were not

lost, believed Beckmann's work mirrored the contemporary situation to some degree.

In 1923, Paul F. Schmidt's article on the artist's recent etchings referred to ”the

 

3“See also the 1922 lithograph, The Theater Foyer, from Berliner Reise.
“Mitchell, 540.

””A Staggering Civilization,” Le Correspondant, 10 April 1922, quoted in The
Living Age (27 May 1922): 521.

14

enormous anguish of our times."38 Hermann EBwein wrote, "And one does not forget
this unbelievable, raving, nerve-racking reality of the present-day impossibility, the
present—day absurdity, when one examines Beckmann's art with its fanatic rationalism
of the inational."39 To Julius Meier-Graefe, Beckmann was the perfect symbol of
postwar Berlin. He calls Berlin a "public toilet," whose art scene is founded on its
citizens’ ”lewdness and oppression,” which Beckmann does not hesitate to show.‘0 In
contrast to pre-war avant-garde notions of a spiritually rejuvenating Armageddon,
Meier-Graefe decides that to find hope for the future Germany must ”actively rot.”
Berlin contains the right "toxins,” and Beckmann "breeds them with destiny and
circumspection.“l According to Beckmann's friend Stephen Lackner, during the
"Roaring Twenties" the artist himself said that he wanted to be ”a child of his
time."42

Contemporary critics noted the emotional isolation characterizing
Beckmann's figures during this period, as when in the 1924 monograph Wilhelm
Fraenger described Beckmann's painting The Dream as ”a spiritual space of quite

purely imaginary strivings, of which each is so restricted to itself and connected so

 

3“Paul F. Schmidt, ”Neue Graphik von Max Beckmann," Jahrbuch derjungen
Kunst (1923): 411.

3"Hermann EBwein, ”Max Beckmann,” Der neue Merkur 7 (October l923-March
1924): 326.

”Julius Meier-Graefe, ”Max Beckmann.” In Wilhelm Fraenger, et al., Max
Beckmann (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1924), 27-8.

“Ibid. , 28.

"Stephen Lackner, Max Beckmann: Memories of a Friendship (Coral Gables:
University of Miami Press, 1969), 35-36.

15

301er to itself, that it passes by ghostlike [voriiberspenstet] in its deepest lack of inner
relationship to the neighboring dream.“3 Although he does not refer specifically to
Trapeze, Rom Landau writes in an essay of 1925, for which Trapeze is the only
illustration,
Beckmann's people are completely alone and brought together as if by accident.
Held together not by their common life, but merely by the space in which they
stand and their outward way. . . . His acrobats and artistes, his carnival players
and dancers, his drunken ones and those rooted in family are torn out of all
human relationship. The same canvas holds them together. Purely and simply
the canvas.“
Of Beckmann's tall, narrow compositions, the cirtic Julius Meier-Graefe observed,
”The narrowness of the box moved the faces obliquely, bent the limbs. The crowded-
together objects made friends with each other by force, dialogued, slept together,

murdered themselves. "‘5 Glaser felt Beckmann's art "affirms every dissension and

every disharmony of the grim present.”5

 

"Wilhelm Fraenger, ”Max Beckmann: Der T raum: ein Beitrag zur Physiognomik
des Grotesken," in Fraenger et al., 42.

“Rom Landau, ”Max Beckmann," in Der Unbestechliche Minos: Kritik an der
Zeitkunst (Hamburg: Harder Verlag, 1925), 61.

"Julius Meier-Graefe, ”Max Beckmann," in Fraenger et al., 30.
“Curt Glaser, ”Max Beckmann," Kunst und Krinstler 21 (August 1923): 313.

Chapter 2

'TRAPEZE" IN THE CONTEXT OF WEIMAR REPUBLIC CULTURE

Varieté

It is probable, then, that this petrified, disconsolate, emotionally
unengaged troupe of acrobats reflects in part the confused and shattered postwar
German social structure. If we look at the setting of Trapeze, a form of stage
entertainment that flourished in Germany in the 19203 known as varieté, we find
another analogy to the troubled times.

In 1920, there were 298 varietés in 147 German cities.” Varieté grew out
of the circus in the nineteenth century and was, during the 19203, very much akin to
cabaret and vaudeville. Varieté shows could take place in large halls or in nightclub
settings with food and drink served at tables.“ There were also seasonal outdoor
varietés. A succession of short acts averaging seven minutes each was the general

format, and a typical two or three hour evening might include comics, singers,

 

”Emst Gr’inther, Geschichte des Varietés (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 141.
General information on varieté comes from Giinther's book.

“Such an example of varieté is seen in Beckmann's etching Nude Dance from the
Berliner Reise portfolio of 1922. Female nudity became prolific in the mid—19203
varieté shows.

16

17

dancing girls, dance couples and groups, magicians, animal tamers, and riders (where
there was room). Occasionally one would see displays of curious human phenomena,
scientific experiments or wonders of nature. Always, though, there were circus-type
acts, and especially acrobatic troupes. Hermann-NeiBe sums up varieté in a 1922
article, published the very month Beckmann began Trapeze. He describes the Oriots
troupe as "a comic acrobatic act which contains everything the ideal variete number
should have: movement, the most brisk tempo, exuberance, a slight erotic thrill and
high acrobatic ability.“9 The scene Beckmann painted could hardly contrast
Hermann-NeiBe'S observations more completely.

Ernst Giinther observes that ”the rushing succession of numbers was often
characterized as 'an expression of the spirit of the times'," and a number of accounts
from the period verify this.’0 ”Rarely," wrote Fred A. Colman in 1928, ”has a time
been so inspired by the world of the varieté, by the varieté impulse, like that of
ours.”1 At the turn of the century, Ernst von Wolzogen found in vaudeville "a sign
of our nervous, precipitate age," and O. J. Bierbaum complained in 1901 that

the contemporary city-dweller has vaudeville nerves; he seldom has the capacity

of following great dramatic continuities, of tuning his senses to the same tone
for three hours. He desires diversity--Varieté.’2

 

”Max Hermann-NeiBe, Kabarett: Schriften zum Kabarett und zur bildende Kunst
(Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1988), 128.

”Ibid., 135.
"Quoted in Giinther, 11.

”Ernst von Wolzogen, Vossische Zeitung, 31 October 1900, quoted in Peter
Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 24; Otto
Julius Bierbaum, ed., Deutsche Chansons (Brett-Lieder), 3d ed. (Berlin, 1901), xi-xii,
quoted in Jelavich, 24.

18

Understanding varieté to comprise dazzling stimulation at a frenetic pace,
Beckmann's depiction exudes a sense of things gone terribly awry. If the fast-paced,
vivacious varieté symbolizes the Golden Twenties, Beckmann makes an ironic
statement—what has gone awry is below the glittering surface. We will explore this

aspect of the painting further ahead in the essay.

Circus and Varieté Motifs in German Art

Circus, cabaret and varieté motifs have played a significant role in modern
German art. This was so before World War I, and again during the 19203.

Perhaps the best-known circus and cabaret paintings in German art come
from the Brucke artists. Jill Lloyd demonstrates that these entertainments were
important sources for, as well as vehicles of, the Brilcke Expressionists' concepts of
the primitive. In the winter of 1908-09, three founders of Die Bru'cke, Ludwig
Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Erich Heckel, exchanged numerous postcards on which
they depicted visits to circuses, cabarets and varietés in Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin
(Figures 12, 13).” The nightspots and the circuses presented a variety of acts
allegedly from India, China, Senegal, and Indonesia, among other places. Many of
these non-European acts were depicted on the Brucke postcards, as well as in paintings
such as Kirchner's Panama Girls (Figure 14) of 1910.

Besides presenting non-Westem cultures, however dubiously, the varieté

 

”Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991), 87.

19

and cabaret genre offered a certain immediacy, sexual abandon, and primal energy
(recall Hermann-NeiBe's allusion to ”a slight erotic thrill”). Especially when embodied
in so—called "exotic” acts with sexual overtones, such as belly-dancers, snake-handlers
and apache dancers, Die Bru”cke's ethos of the primitive and non-rational was near-
literally brought to life.

Lloyd also suggests that Kirchner used the cabaret and varieté motifs as
signs of his commitment to modernity. As mentioned, cabaret and varieté had come to
symbolize a certain pace of living, an engagement with the rush and excitement of the
pre—war German city. Thus a painting like Panama Girls mixes emphatic urban
modernity with a primitivist spirit.

Several Weimar Republic artists as well, although not necessarily part of
the Expressionist movement, took the circus, cabaret, and other urban entertainment
for their subjects. Their motivations, however, were diverse.

Paul Kleinschmidt (1883-1949) was described in the mid-19203 as an
”ardent visitor of concert cafés and night cabarets. "" There he painted women with
unvaryingly robust and buxom figures, either as patrons or as performers behind the
scenes. Dressing Room (Figure 15) and Theater Dressing Room (Figure 16) typify
what Barbara Lipps-Kant regards as Kleinschmidt's fascination for the ”dazzling,
dubious atmosphere" of performers' dressing rooms.” The circus provided

Kleinschmidt with a similar subject matter. In 1926 and 1927, he spent time with the

 

“Barbara Lipps-Kant, Paul Kleinschmidt: 1883-1949 (Ph.D. diss., Universitéit
Tt’ibingen, 1974), 61.

”Ibid. , 55.

20

Busch Circus, painting and sketching both performances and backstage scenes. From
this association emerged a series of circus rider portrayals, including both the "large"
and "small" Female Circus Rider (Figures 17, 18).

Lipps-Kant and Ernst Schremmer, another of Kleinschmidt's biographers,
disagree on some points regarding the artist's intentions in the nightspot paintings.
Schremmer detects no social critique, and only rarely satire or caricature.’6 Instead,
Schremmer believes the artist simply displays a feel for the superficial conviviality of
19203 Berlin.’7 By contrast, Lipps-Kant feels Kleinschmidt wanted to ”unmask the
racketeers and the war profiteers, wanted to show the subversion of life.”8 Coffee
Concert (Figure 19) of 1925 is typical of these nightclub pictures; Lipps-Kant believes
the men in many such scenes are gangsters with their girlfriends. In partial agreement
with Schremmer, she also considers the paintings "records of the environment” and
"artistic witnesses with the character of period documents."59 She compares
Kleinschmidt to Dix and Grosz in this regard, though Kleinschmidt hardly treats his
jolly nightclubbers with Grosz's uncompromising vilification, or Dix's vapid
amorality.

In her dissertation, Lipps—Kant contrasts Kleinschmidt's circus paintings

 

“Emst Schremmer, ". . . und zwingt sie, schon zu sein: der Maler Paul
Kleinschmidt," in Paul Kleinschmidt: 1883-1949: Gemdlde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen,
und Druckgraphik (Stuttgart: Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, 1983), 43-44.

S7Ibid.

”Lipps-Kant, ”Wer ist Paul Kleinschmidt?" In Paul Kleinschmidt: 1883-1949
(Ulm: Ulmer Museum, 1978), 14.

”Ibid. , 22.

21
with the title page of Beckmann's Yearly Fair portfolio, The Barker (Figure 20).
Beckmann, she says, uses the carnival barker persona, and the circus motif generally,
for ”self- and social-critical reflections.
Paul Kleinschmidt's view is completely different. He does not endeavor to take
stock of himself. Nor does the meaning of life appear to be questioned. He is
impressed with the power of clustered physicality and the force of the
movement. He brings both into view together in heightened forrn.‘so
Whether he painted the circus or Berlin nightlife, however, the true raison
d'étre of Kleinschmidt's paintings were his sculptural, athletic, and buxom women.
Both Schremmer and Lipps-Kant point out Kleinschmidt's emphasis on his female
figures' "physicality" or ”substantiality” [I(r'5rperlichkeit].“l It is Schremmer's
contention that these women depict Kleinschmidt's ideal of beauty, ”measured against
the appearance of his mother and of his wife."62
Similarly to Kirchner and the Brucke Expressionists, Georg Tappert (1880—
1957) used the varieté motif to evoke the pulse and atmosphere of modern city life. In
the opinion of his most recent biographer, Georg Wietek, Tappert's pre-war varieté
paintings, such as Can—Can (Figure 21) and Two Female Dancers (Figure 22) utilized
contrast and repetition to mimic the insistent rhythms of the new jazz music.‘13 In

1924, Paul Glaser had likewise compared Beckmann's paintings, in his review of the

Berlin exhibit that included Trapeze, to contemporary jazz. He called Beckmann ”this

 

6"Lipps—Kant, Kleinschmidt, 69.
6'Lipps—Kant, Kleinschmidt, 69; Schremmer, 42, 47.
“Schremmer, 47-48.

mGerhard Wietek, Georg T appert: 1880-195 7: Ein Wegbereiter der deutschen
Moderne (Munich: Verlag Karl Thiemig, 1980), 38.

22

artist with the blare of the jazz band shrilling in his ears.“ Contrasting Beckmann's
new postwar style and realistic subject matter with his earlier Romantic, historical
style, Glaser said the Berlin pieces contain "something from those new sounds that
arise in the music of our day, in which the artistic form would seemingly be found in
the noise itself, and perhaps it is no accident that a shrill uproar is executed in
Beckmann's pictures with wind instruments. Now that we have the jazz band, a
Vienna waltz is a sentimental lie."65

Following the war, Tappert, like Kleinschmidt, took long expeditions
through the cafes and nightspots of Berlin. He thus continued his varieté genre,
painting many subjects behind the scenes in those venues, as Wietek tells us, with an
”unfeigned and unveiled glance (63)." Wietek also observes in these later works a
"deeply rooted compassion and sympathy for the human creature,” as in The Negress
Nyassa with Conch Shell (Figure 23) and Young Woman Acrobat, both of the late
19203 (63).

It is Wietek's opinion that during this period Tappert used the clown
figure, many of which appear to be unacknowledged self-portraits of the artist, as an
embodiment of human tragedy. In 1928, Tappert befriended the famous acrobatic
family, the Fratinellis, and Wietek speculates that Tappert's paintings of the family in
action represent "both a human and an artistic overcoming of resignation (63).”

Carnival, Harlequin and Pierrot, and the circus were frequent motifs in

 

“Paul Glaser, ”Beckmann: zu der Ausstellung bei Paul Cassirer,” Berliner Borsen-
Courier, 6 January 1924.

“Ibid.

23
Karl Hofer's (1878-1955) paintings of the 19203. Harlequin and Pierrot have a long

history of representing the dichotomy between one's outer ”performance" and their
true (usually doleful) inner life. As with Beckmann, these figures further represent for
Hofer the artist's special license, whether it be to dispense wisdom or express one's
guarded inner life. Ida Katherine Rigby relates that the artist's friends characterized
Hofer as ”a tacitum, proper, brittle man whose face never betrayed an emotion . .
3'“ Hofer's masked Harlequin figures, as in The Brothers (Figure 25), expressed
freely for Hofer his inner feelings.

Similarly, Jiirgen Schilling believes the carnival pictures signify "the ideal
proximity of artist and fool.”"’ As Margot Clark points out, the fool traditionally
”was adjudged to have clairvoyant abilities, and he had the privilege of being allowed
to tell his so—called lord the truth with impunity."68 This is the role Clark believes
Beckmann plays in Self—Portrait as a Clown (Figure 26), the artist who possesses
higher knowledge and sensitivity than ordinary men, who imparts hard, tragic truths to
humanity. Matthias Eberle analyzes Hofer's painting of 1921, Circus People (Figure

27), linking it to Hofer's continual unsettledness between Expressionist currents and

 

“Ida Katherine Rigby, Karl Hofer (New York: Garland, 1976), 122.
“’Jiirgen Schilling, Karl Hofer, (Unna: Unna Kreise, 1991), 15.

“Margot Clark, ”Beckmann's Abbilder des metaphysischen 'Selbst'." In Max
Beckmann: F ranldurt 1915-1933: Eine Ausstellung zum 100. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus
Gallwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Stadische Galerie im Stadelschen Kunstinstitut, 1983),
37.

24

Classicism.69 In the painting, the muscular acrobat eyes Columbine, the dancer,
longingly. But Pierrot pushes him away with one hand while pulling Columbine to
him with the other. The ball and flowers on Columbine's side of the stage, according
to Eberle, represent play and beauty, while the various apparatus around the acrobat
indicate dexterity and agility. Eberle simply writes, "The composition is indeed a
metaphor, a simile of the position of Pierrot (the artist) between the overcoming of
reality (acrobat), and love and play (female dancer).""° To expand on this remark,
love, play and beauty would represent the passionate approach of Expressionism,
while the acrobat stands for disciplined classicism, grounded in controlled depiction of
nature. Pierrot, as the artistic persona, is denying Hofer's conservative, academic
tendency the free reign of the Expressionist style. Thus Pierrot is not so much
coveting Columbine as shutting her away from the acrobat, protecting him from
temptation. On a more personal level, if Hofer is indeed so reserved and inhibited,
and if masked Pierrot figures allow Hofer deeper psychological expression, this might
explain Pierrot's unabashed pursuit of Columbine, at the acrobat's expense. In either
case, the irony is that Hofer uses so traditional a motif, in a Cubist-Neoclassical style,
to seemingly lament his own lack of spontanaeity. Like Beckmann, then, Hofer used
the carnival and circus realm for personal exploration.

Hofer also painted cabaret and jazz club scenes, such as Tiller Girls

 

“Matthias Eberle, "Neue Wirklichkeit, Surrealismus und Neue Sachlichkeit.” In
T endenzen der Zwanzingen Jahre (Berlin: Dietrich Reiner Verlag, 1977), 131. Eberle

even suggests this was one source of Hofer's melancholy, a melancholy Rigby calls
"congenital" (130).

70Ibid.

25
(Figure 28) of 1923, as well as patrons in loges at the ballet, opera and theater. Rigby

declares these scenes "entirely different” from the work of Die Bru'cke, as well as of
Dix and Grosz." Rather, she compares his interest in these bourgeois entertainments
to that of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionists—-not, then, as satire or social
criticism. In Adolf Jannasch's 1946 description of Hofer's nightclub scenes the
relationship to comtemporary jazz is once again raised, as other critics have done with
Tappert and Beckmann: ". . . the syncopes of the jazz orchestra solidify into period
documents, become frozen music, the dancing girls of the night cabarets remain like
enchanted puppets in the parallelism of their rhythm, . . ."72

All these German artists, then, used the varieté and related venues as icons
of frenetic and disjointed modern German urban life. With the apparent exception of
Kleinschmidt, they also used carnival and circus motifs to explore deeper human
issues. In many of these works, and certainly in Trapeze, the varieté provided the
artist both worlds: something of the circus, with its rich and time-honored potential

for symbol and metaphor, along with a thoroughly modern setting.

Art Criticism during the Weimar Republic

German art criticism during the Weimar Republic was often an

impassioned affair. Following the devastating world war, many critics ecstatically

 

“Rigby, 147.

72Adolf Jannasch, Karl Hofer (Postsdam: E. Stichnote, 1946), 13, quoted in
Schilling, 15.

26

proclaimed the new artistic generation's role in creating a millenium of world
community. There was also no lack of conviction as to what constituted truly German
art. Such art was passionate, touched by suffering, and grounded in objective reality.
Critics often contrasted this vigorous German art with what they disdained as the
effete intellectualism of the French. Occasionally one even detects fertile soil for
Naziism in this criticism, both groups sharing heartfelt concepts of a superior
”Northern" spirit that runs in German blood. But whether running to extremes or
taking a more level approach, whether praising or deprecating his work, the majority
of critics found Max Beckmann to be authentically German.
As noted earlier, Beckmann's critics who wrote under the Weimar

Republic tended to see him as a chronicler of his times more than have recent
scholars. Doubtless Beckmann's images had more impact on those living the reality of
postwar Germany. Moreover, contemporary artists like Grosz and Dix, as well as
John Heartfield and the Dadaists, actively engaged in social satire. Many critics
discerned in Beckmann a meeting of contemporary realism and more transcendent
concerns. "Beckmann's art is a coming-to-terrns with the world and with life. . . .,”
declared Georg Swarzenski in 1927.

It is so emphatically current that its emergence is only conceivable today, and

yet has already begun to envelop a worldview which stands so solidly between

past and present that it must be felt as an enduring existence, and is convincing

as to its absolute reality.73

Much of his essay--written when Beckmann's style was at its most economical, and

his objects their most corporeal--elucidates the organic quality the artist imparts to

 

7”Georg Swarzenski, ”Um Max Beckmann,” Das neue Frankfurt 1, no. 4 (1924):
81.

27

those objects, implying a hidden content. Beckmann's objects and people, Swarzenski
wrote, have become ”bearer, theater and playground of life" and "embodiments of
hidden and visible humanity.” In the same year, in the first English language essay
published on Beckmann, the painter Adolph Glassgold said the graphic portfolios
reflected Germany's postwar tragedy. But instead of pointing at any one group, wrote
Glassgold, Beckmann ”sees inhumanity as the tragedy of existence. . . . He interprets
his 'zeit' with material found in the very depths of his being."75 Heinrich Simon
praised Beckmann's Hell portfolio for showing that ”the connections between overall
events and the individual soul . . . is also secretly discernible in that which is
unconscious in existence."76

Simon believed that now more than ever, artists must wrestle with their
souls and not turn away from events around them. ”The pretty cover is shed and
underneath lies a body ravaged from lack, sickness and wounds,” he writes of
Germany, and the artist must not be detached. Instead he should resolve his inner
spiritual conflicts and exhibit ”a new ecstasy of the soul” in his art.77 Such a
challenge echoes Beckmann's call of 1920 to ”abandon our heart and nerves to the

horrifying cries of pain of poor, deceived humanity,” in order to give them a ”picture

 

7‘Ibid. , 84.

7SAdolph C. Glassgold, ”Max Beckmann,” The Arts 11, no. 5 (May 1927): 243-
44.

7“Heinrich Simon, ”Max Beckmann,” Das Kunstblatt 3 (September, 1919): 258-

77Simon, "Max Beckmann,” 258.

28
of its fate."78
As the early postwar years progressed, Beckmann's art indeed became less

and less directly about " general events"; much more, it was founded on humanity's,
and the artist's own, struggle to find meaning. "One cannot doubt that today's art is
an indispensable expression of our spiritual condition,” opens Schmidt's essay of 1919
on Beckmann.79 Schmidt spends much time on The Night, surely Beckmann's most
powerful work from the early postwar period. The Night illustrates the critic's belief
that ”the true artist is a prophet of his times and not 'topical'; his art arises from
deeper and truly religious layers of the social consciousness.”0 Of this work,
Schmidt wrote,

We look through the horror of the proceedings as through the veil of Maja into

the tragedy of life itself; into that which is confused and insolvable in a state of

affairs, which means war in the broadest sense, war of the living and of the

material, madness and derangement of the spirit and hopeless suffering of all

creatures. Not that men are being killed here is the horror, but rather that there

is murder and pain, that life is not a paradise but rather a senselessness and a

mass of tortures of every kind."

Concurrently with Beckmann's own inner search, a preoccupation with the

modern artist as priest and evangelist of a spiritual rebirth developed in German
criticism. This same thread ran through European avant-garde art generally, of course-

-but it was a time of diverse and perhaps a desperate religious seeking in Germany,

and surely critics were sensitive to metaphysical currents in art. The flame still burned

 

7“Beckmann, Schopferische Konfession, 63.

7"Paul F. Schmidt, ”Max Beckmann," Der Cicerone 11 (31 October 1919): 675.
”Ibid., 684.

“Ibid., 683.

29

in modern art to lead mankind to a new heaven and a new earth.

Schmidt exemplified this attitude. His essay of 1924, ”The Art of Our
Time," is largely an apologia for the often disturbing trend in German contemporary
art. Today's artists, proclaimed Schimidt, are heroes, struggling for salvation, for a
new spiritual path for humanity. The art appears as "blasphemy” only to those who
don't understand, who don't share the vision. Schmidt was rhapsodic concerning the
heroic artist: "The sacrifice of an individual's life weighs lightly when the mission is
the revelation of a worldview; regarding the suffering of all creation, these great souls
deliver themselves up to all trial, and this with joy, with the conviction of martyrs."2
In 1922, in his essay, ”The New Religion of the Artistic Youth," Paul Kiippers
appeared to be more mystic than art critic. Also extolling the young postwar
generation, who "build monuments to the new faith," he insisted art must evidence
"the experiencing of the religious."83 In nearly Biblical language, he wrote,
”Whoever does not believe in this new religiosity, from them will the deep heart of
this artistic movement remain forever hidden. What can the unbeliever say about the
prayer of the believer?” As with many artists and critics alike, ”prayer” is an apt
word--Kr‘ippers, too, saw the new art as an heroic journey to spiritual salvation, ”an

expression of human longings and hopes," and, ”milestones on the path to God.”

 

”Schmidt, ”Die Kunst unserer Tage," Jahrbuch derjungen Kunst (1924), 356.

”Paul Erich Kt’ippers, ”Die neue Religion der kt‘instlerischen Jugend," Jahrbuch
derjungen Kunst (1922), 259.

“Ibid., 260.
”Ibid., 260, 263.

30
Georg Biermann was the most ecstatic of all. He assumed that art reveals
the underlying spiritual currents of society, and recognized that the contemporary art,
of Trapeze's time, sought to show the way to a new ideal society and personhood.“
His aspirations for art bespoke the avant-garde's optimism and sense of mission in the
century's first quarter:
Here is the postulate of the new youth, here flames the torch of the future with
strong hope, into the night of a present harnessed in gloomy doubt. Here for the
first time we sense clearly that community of European spirit, in which--
contemptuous of the petty acts of day to day politics--the wish for ultimate
human creed manifests itself. In the pictures of the new art we experience the
new man, . . ."7

Biermann ended by comparing the day's artists to evangelists and apostles whose

challenge was to bring the new artistic consciousness to the general public.“

How extraordinary these passionate visions of world community were,
arising as they did out of humiliated Germany, a country that in many quarters still
raged-eventually with catastrophic results--over the terms of the Versailles peace. In
Schmidt's case, even as he wrote, the French had invaded the Ruhr district on the
slimmest of premises.

Though the alleged new spiritual currents in art and society appear to have
enthralled Kiippers as much as Biermann and Schmidt, Kiippers also desired a measure

of reality and control. His ideal art exhibited a balance of ”logos" and "eros". He

found Chagall to be an outstanding alchemist of logos and eros: ”Here is heart and

 

“Georg Biermann, "Kunstwende: Die neue Kunst a1 soziologisch-psychologisches
Problem," Jahrbuch derjungen Kunst (1921), 281.

”Ibid.
“Ibid. , 288.

31
brain, flesh and spirit, animalistic and godly."'° He admired Chagall's combination

of ecstatic color and disciplined ”concreteness.” These remarks are a bridge to those
German critics who admired Max Beckmann's unrepentant devotion to nature and
objectivity.

In his review of the Berlin exhibition in 1924 that included Trapeze, for
example, Paul Glaser described Beckmann's ”clarity in space, objectivity of
representation, cruel sobriety of hard contours."90 In a mostly disdainful essay, the
conservative and highly respected critic Meier-Graefe applauded the "iron discipline”
evidenced in Beckmann's concrete form.91 ”After the heavenly fiction of a merely
aesthetic painting," he wrote, probably referring to Kandinsky, among others, "we
need such of Beckmann's, completely abstained from it, that the fiction might be
continued, but without the heavenly.” In his history of modern painting, Meier-Graefe
criticized Expressionism's "fiction" generally: "That which was dubious about the
blood-rich art of the last generation was its loss of the fact. Over painting, reality
came to grief. ”’2 Swarzenski acclaimed Beckmann's ”substance,” that the people and
objects form a ”pictorial totality whose construction is felt monumentally. "93

Beckmann does not operate in the realm of the intellect, of aestheticism, but rather

 

”Kiippers, 256.
90P. Glaser.
91Meier-Graefe, ”Max Beckmann," in Fraenger et al, 32.

92Meier-Graefe, Die Kunst unserer T age: Von Cézanne bis heute (Munich: Piper
Verlag, 1927), 678. Emphasis added.

9“Swarzenski, 84.

32

possesses ”the categorical will and compulsion to fashion the chaos into form."°‘
Beckmann seemed to strike precisely the right balance for Swarzenski between geist
and sinn, conveying potent meditation on the human condition, and perhaps something
transmundane, while remaining rooted in nature and objectivity. By comparison,
Swarzenski found Expressionism ”undisciplined,” abstraction and Cubism ”playful,"
New Objectivity ”boring and illustrative.”

Admiration for Beckmann's combination of a figurative style with
transcendent content ran deeper than mere aesthetic rifts between Classicist and
Expressionist advocates. Beckmann's critics awarded him their most passionate and
prolific approval based on his unimpeachable Germanness. Numerous essays took up
the debate between French and German art, seeing the two as fundamentally opposed.
The arguments frequently described national psyches and spirits, even using the term
”blood"--also a favorite of the National Socialists. Even the relatively conservative
critics exalted nature, suffering, passion and spirit over the precious intellectual
contrivances of the French. Paradoxically, these notions infused the very essays which
celebrated the new art's role in realizing the coming universal brotherhood.

”If I imagine today a specific German art, it is called Beckmann."96 So
pronounced Wilhelm Hausenstein, with Meier-Graefe the period's most respected art
critic. Hausenstein defined German art with conviction, contrasting the ”Gothic” and

”Romanic [sic]" sensibilities. While acknowledging that the Gothic originated in

 

9‘Ibid.
”Ibid. , 85.

”Hausenstein, ”Max Beckmann,” 69.

33
France, he nevertheless maintained that that which truly appears Gothic opposes the
mindset of ”the Romanic nations”: "The Gothic genius actually won its identity
specifically in the German spirit,” he wrote."7 Classicism is innate to the French, he
believed, due to their Latin heritage. Both Cubism and the resurgent Neoclassicism in
France (for example, Andre Derain) are content posing artistic problems for
themselves to solve--thus indulging in a self-secure insularity. By contrast, "the
problematic, the tormenting, is the Germans' portion."98 Curt Glaser made a nearly
identical statement: ”It appears a fate of German art that it produces works of
struggle, fulfills itself in the problematic, only rarely comes to peaceful tranquility, to
idyllic peace and lovely self-indulgence in sensuous charm."99 The true German art,
according to Hausenstein, mixed objectivity and the metaphysical, mixed nature and
passion. Such a mix is compulsive in the German spirit:

It is most certain that the Gothic, at the same time an expressive and
constructive notion, corresponds particularly to the genius of the Germans and,
in this sense at least, is generated from the simultaneously exuberant and
constructive mentality of the Germans. The crossing of excessiveness and

construction is clearly, all too clearly, a German virtue--a German necessity.loo

Meier-Graefe derided French Impressionism, rueing that school's ”loss of the object"

 

”Ibid.

9“Hausenstein, "Zum Thema: Die Situation der Kunst," Die neue Rundschau 34
(March 1923), 223.

9"Curt Glaser, ”Max Beckmann," Kunst und Kr’instler 21, no. 11 (August 1923),
312.

looHausenstein, ”Max Beckmann,” 70.

34
as well as its upholding of rationality over passion.101 Schmidt similarly disdained
Impressionism as ”the artistic expression of a materialistic epoch."102
Schmidt, amidst his bright prophecies for the brave new world, argued

German art's superiority over French with particular emotion. He continued of
Impressionism that it was ”a flower of a Romanic-French cultural form and
completely and from the roots contrary to the German being."‘°3 French art
comprised rules, order and convention. The French made "ephemeral, rarefied things
of beauty” and ”luxury articles of superior grade;" their concern was for ”beautiful
form" and ”atelier problems.'”°‘ German art, by contrast, was of heart and bones, of
the here-and—now struggle and passion of real humanness. It was ”a virulent rebellion
against Romantic formalism."‘°’ Coming as they do from an art critic, Schmidt's
fevered exaltations of artistic Germandom are remarkable even for the idealistic milieu
of European modernism. "Germanic art," he argued,

is not a matter of form and harmony, but a vessel of demonic will to expression,

a means to release the soul from panic-stricken earthly and religious

anxiety,. . . . Their rhythm is not the illustration of a pre-stabilized harmony,

but a helpless doubt about the disharmony of the world, and thus a materialized

chaos with the vain longing after order. Absolutely no Classicism and no
Cubism satisfy such a wild urge for self-absorption into the cosmos (364).

 

l°'Meier-Graefe, ”Unsere Kunst nach dem Kriege,” Die neue Rundschau 34 (May
1923), 397.

”Schmidt, ”Die Kunst unserer Tage," 359.
1°3Ibid.

lo‘Schmidt, "Neue Graphik von Max Beckmann," Jahrbuch derjungen Kunst
(1923), 411.

105Schmidt, ”Die Kunst unserer Tage,” 360.

35

Schmidt maintained that a higher law embraces the German spirit than structured
society's external, traditional, and learnable law--which is to say, ”the closed unity of
schools” found in French art. The Germanic spirit follows a calling "dangerous” and
”rich," because ”there is no measure for the experience of the soul (364). What of
French art and the soul?--"The entire French development . . . bypasses every
spiritual meaning and art of expression for formal problems (372).”

A final aspect of Schmidt's aesthetic completed Beckmann's qualification
as a ”most highly representative German.“°° A truly German art encompassed not
only nature, but the present. It consisted of ”the vile sin of the current; and an
unpardonable barbarity of frankness, a fanaticism of truth which is very difficult for
all the priests of pure painting to digest.”‘°" It was ”in the highest sense a document
of the times,” concerned for "the incredible distress of our time."‘°‘ The
metaphysical willfully submitted to concrete nature, the turmoil of the modern world
lifted up into the ageless realm of human passion, struggle, suffering and
transcendence--many Weimar Republic critics saw this as German art, many saw this
as Max Beckmann. Curt Glaser contrasted Beckmann with Matisse and ”art for art's
sake”: the German sought not peace, but agitation; not ”an objective picture of

tranquil existence,” but a ”subjective expression of agitated fantasy . . . With all this

 

106Schmidt, ”Neue Graphik von Max Beckmann," 416.
‘°’Ibid., 411.
lo"Ibid.

36

is Beckmann a German painter.'”°° We recall Hausenstein's identification of Gothic
and the German spirit; to Hausenstein the Gothic is ”palpable,” and ”a given” in
Beckmann. ”The Gothic lives in him, is inherent in him; it declares in him its
permanence . . . "“° Hausenstein discussed contemporary German art's ”chimeric"
character, ”the crossing of excessiveness and construction” referred to above. There
was a "violent ven'sm," a "torturing truthfulness of the objects," which then transform
abruptly into the metaphysical. ”Thus comes into being the chimeric of the German
Gothic," he concluded, ”. . . thus comes into being the chimeric of Beckmann's
art."”l Heinrich Simon focused on German art's "barbarity of frankness," to use
Schmidt's term. "There is and was," he wrote, ”to every time a German art that was
looked at by the plentiful philistines in one's own and foreign lands as ugly, crude,
crass, unnatural, violent.

This unnatural art, which is therefore an art not remaining in the agreeable, but

rather forging ahead toward the spiritual--this ugly, therefore desiring of truth,

this crude and violent, therefore brave art, which does not shrink back in fear

from the most difficult problems, is and will always be a singularly German art.

Beckmann is in this sense a German painter.“2

Some found Beckmann's supposedly relentless depiction of life's

unpalatable side stiff and unconvincing. Meier-Graefe opened his essay in the

monograph of 1924 with the declaration, "Beckmann is the new Berlin,” and told us

 

l°"C. Glaser, 313. Glaser is quick to make clear he does not mean this in a
nationalistic sense.

”°Hausenstein, "Max Beckmann,” 69.
“'Ibid., 70.
”’Simon, 264.

37

that Beckmann was perfect for that city's decay.“3 He criticized the artist's postwar
style, however, for being too relentlessly factual, at the expense of any real
feeling.” Beckmann's figures convey no suffering, only ”the non-spirit of the
fact.”“’ In his essay containing Trapeze as the only illustration, Landau complained
that ”matter-of-fact ugliness, merciless sobriety and open-ribbed nakedness have
reigned [in German art] for years, while ”charm and beauty are despised.”“‘ He
called Beckmann's figures ”marionettes" and "mannequins” which ”are missing the
first thing: the breath of good-hearted humanity."117 Karl Scheffler praised Beckmann
highly before the war, but in 1924 found that ”His space is not spacious, his light
does not illuminate, the dreams are not dreamlike, his prostitutes are not slutty, his

iron is not of iron, the air is not breezy.”“'

Religion in the Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic art world's fervid prophecies reflect the postwar

crisis of faith. Discussing Post-Impressionism, John Richardson observed in Modern

 

113Meier-Graefe, ”Max Beckmann," 27.

“‘Recall Swarzenski criticized the New Objectivity (with which critics occasionally
associated Beckmann) on the same grounds.

“‘Ibid., 30.

“‘Landau, 61.

117Ibid.

“'Karl Scheffler, "Max Beckmann," Kunst und Kunstler 22 (February 1924): 109.

38

Art and Scientific Thought, "As usual in ages of doubt and uncertainty, melancholy
and foreboding, people everywhere exhibited strong inclinations towards spiritualism
and a predilection for the certainties of religion.”“° Such was the case in
Beckmann's Germany, where any number of cults and movements, along with more
conventional religious explorations, mushroomed. In his 1922 report, Brandes
described the spiritual restlessness he saw: ”German youth is lost in abstractions as to
the future; it lives in a world that bears no relation to real life; it dreams of the
coming of a new religion."”° Gordon Allport reported in The New Republic, as
Beckmann completed Trapeze, that ”religious life has been shaken from the
foundations. The state evangelical church has rapidly lost its hold; mystical sects--both
Christian and non-Christian—-are on the increase.121 Hermann Hesse confirmed the
situation:

In times like the present a general impatience and disillusion with both received

religious creeds and scholarly philosophies grow; the demand for new

formulations, new interpretations, new symbols, new explanations is infinitely

great. These are the signs of the mental life of our times: a weakening of

received systems, a wild searching for new interpretations of human life, a

flourishing of popular sects, prophets, communities, and a blossoming of the

most fantastic superstitions. ”2

In 1925, the German government recognized 812 different religious

 

“’John Richardson, Modern Art and Scientific Thought (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1971), 84.

l2"Brandes, 328.

121Gordon Allport, ”Germany's State of Mind,” The New Republic 34 (14 March
1923): 64.

122Hermann Hesse, ”The Longing of Our Time for a Worldview (Die Sehnsucht
unserer Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung)," Uhu 2 (1926): 3-14. In Kaes, Jay and
Dimendberg, 366.

39

designations. "3 The great expansion of independent Christian and pseudo—Christian
churches and sects accounted for one substantial part of this astonishing number.
Typical, for example, was the Weissenberg sect, whose members embraced occult
practices and featured mediums supposedly speaking for Biblical figuresm Drechsler
Lorenz founded the Lorenzians, occupied especially with The Revelation of St. John
and declaring Lorenz to be Christianity's final prophet)” Many Christian offshoots
were nationalistic, Aryanist and anti-Semetic. They sought the reunification, as they
saw it, of Christianity and the German volk. Several allied themselves with the Nazis,
including the German Christians and the German Ecclesiastical Movement.”‘s

Some religious movements combined Christianity with other notions, as in
the Nordic Religious Association, a conglomeration of earlier groups that obtained
strength after the war. ”7 These groups were pantheistic, incorporating Norse
religious motifs and occasionally practicing nudism. Many-were Aryanist and anti-
Semetic.”' These same spiritual currents often took hold as well in the period's

prolific Youth Movements, or wandervogel, with other such movements recognizing

 

12i’Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler: Background,
Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 92.

12‘Ibid. , 91.
12’Ibid.

12"Josef Hofer and Karl Rahner, eds., Lexikon fiir Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg:
Herder, 1957), 3:263, 308.

127Helmreich, 79.

12‘Hbfer and Rahner, 3:306.

40

Christian or Far Eastern philosophies.129

Still other sects seemingly developed on purely original, personal
inspiration. The charismatic Friedrich Muck-Lamberty engendered a provincial
phenomenon in 1920. Calling the population of Thuringia to awake to life and be
merry, Muck-Lamberty lectured on ”the Revolution in the Soul" and led thousands of
barefoot followers, calling themselves the New Band, on triumphal processions into
the reluctant local churches' sanctuariesm

The currency of Far Eastern and Indian belief systems was also
marked.131 The Nobel prize-winning Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath
Tagore's spiritual writings, advocating ”love, not power,” were first published in
Germany in 1921, enjoying great popularity.132 The same year, Hermann Keyserling,
a cultural psychologist and liberal Christian drawing on Eastern religion, founded the
School of Wisdom in Darmstadt.133 As a contemporary witness described it,
Keyserling believed that ”The ideal man was to be created by blending the inwardness
of Asia with the vigour of Christian Europe. The new world must be built by new

citizens.""‘ The second statement, of course, closely follows Schmidt's, Kfippers's,

 

12"Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and
Row, 1968), 77.

130Walter Z. Laquer, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 117.

mIbid., 116.
”’Ibid.; Hofer and Rahner, 9:1275.
133Hofer and Rahner, 6:138.

”George P. Gooch, Germany (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), 326.

41

and other German critics' scenarios for Germany's spiritual renaissance.

Not everyone shared an enthusiasm for the Weimar Republic's
preponderance of chimeric religious embarkations. Hans Martin Elster, editor of Die
Horen, wrote,

We are, in the greatest measure of the word, too religious. This religiosity
encompasses the entire positive and negative bearing of life, in the same way
creatively as destructively, no less in eternal agitation as rest, no less in the ever
new tension between the beliefs as in the gaining of unity by force. This
religiosity embraces equally the world of Demeter, the Earth Mother, the
maternal womb, as the realm of Apollo, God the Father, Christ, the heavenly
boundlessness, and we are its bearers and its obligated ones in every time and in
every extent.”

Paul Dahlke, who wrote extensively on Buddhism during the period, doubted the
integrity of the burgeoning movements:

Now indeed our times work at the creation of new moral values, but all
these values deny their artificiality as little as the synthetic medicine of modern
chemistry denies its artificial character. They lack the inner necessity peculiar to
all that is natural. All moralistic endeavors of our time retain the character of
experiment or sport.136

In light of the postwar religious scenario, a detailed investigation of its Theosophic,
Gnostic and 19th-Century German Romantic philosophical content will show Trapeze

to be a representative feature in the Weimar Republic's complex spiritual landscape.

 

l3’Hanns Martin Elster, "Die Lage des deutschen Geistes in der Gegenwart,” Die
Horen 2 (1926): 4.

13“Paul Dahlke, Die Bedeutung des Buddhismus fur unsere Zeit (Munich: Oskar
SchoB Verlag, 1924), 7-8.

Chapter 3

PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF 'TRAPEZE"

The real basis of Beckmann's art, writes Kessler, is "an involved
philosophic-romantic—religious tendency of thought."137 Carla Schulz-Hoffman
recognizes "a religious/philosophical understanding fed through the most diverse
sources."138 Beckmann's library and diaries, and accounts of those who knew him,
indicate the artist was well-read in both philosophy and religion. All scholars agree
that German philosophers as well as ancient Western and non-Westem myths and
religious systems greatly influenced Beckmann's worldview. To varying degrees, most
explore how these sources manifest themselves in the artist's work.

Does Trapeze indicate Beckmann's self-image as artist—evangelist? The
small, prone figure beneath the trapezists themselves is very close to a self-portrait. If
so, Beckmann appears to present the scene to us, as if indeed to "give humanity a
picture of its fate." At the same time, he is pressed almost flat to the stage under the

tableau's weight, as though nearly crushed by the awesome responsibility of his

 

mKessler, 6.

13”Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, 'Gitter, Fessel, Maske: Zum Problem der Unfreiheit
im Werk von Max Beckmann. " In Max Beckmann: Retrospektive, Carla Schulz-
Hoffmann and Judith C. Weiss, eds. (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1984), 51.

42

43

prophetic vision.139 In more recent scholarship, Eberle notes a gesture appearing in
several Beckmann self-portraits from this period. The right arm is extended with the
palm up, which Eberle suggests identifies the artist with the martyred Christ, as found
in Gothic Deposition scenes."° This gesture first evolves in The Descent from the
Cross (Figure 29), where Beckmann portrays himself literally as Christ, a part he also
plays in Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (Figure 30) of the same year. The
gesture as it appears in Trapeze is seen in the tormented man in The Night, as well as
in Family Portrait (Figure 31) and Self-Portrait as a Clown. In this last painting, the

shadow in Beckmann's extended palm suggests a nail hole.

Schopenhauer

The scholars Hildegard Zenser, Hans Belting and Margot Clark have
explored the impact of Schopenhauer's ideas on Beckmann's art in more detail than
most. Only Clark, however, thoroughly analyzes a Beckmann work per
Schopenhauer's thought. She devotes some twenty-two pages of her dissertation to

Beckmann's 1942 painting, Four Men around a Table, characterizing it as ”saturated

 

13"In a passage from 1924, Hausenstein's imagery seems to validate this latter
reading for the Beckmann figure. To Hausenstein, Beckmann was indeed a heroic
martyr, weighed down with the burden of a higher calling: ”In this art, absolutely
nothing has happened by accident, but rather everything by moral imperative. This art
is a true misfortune--of fate: Destiny--pain and lust under the pressure of a destiny.
Beckmann, proletarian specialist, a man of strong vigor, a worker, a pack-carrier,
carries this destiny. Through days and weeks he is hidden behind the work and groans
under the burden (Hausenstein, ”Max Beckmann," 71).

l”Eberle, The Weimar Artists, 92.

44

with Beckmann's ruminations on the Self in terms that owe much to
Schopenhauer."“' Clark limits herself primarily to Schopenhauer's and Beckmann's
comparative ideas concerning the individual's transcendence of worldly life. Besides
this area of Clark's research, I will explore how Beckmann's opinions regarding art
and spirituality relate to Schopenhauer's philosophy. I will also look at both men's
belief in the essentially tragic nature of human sexuality.

Because Beckmann was almost militantly against abstract art, believing that
transcendental meanings must be grounded in nature, he was quite in accord with
certain ideas of Schopenhauer.142 Schopenhauer held that all phenomena, all
sensation, all experience and all that we designate ”reality” is simply a construct of the
intellect in exclusive service to the objectification and manifestation of the Will, a
blind and purposeless life force, at once self-perpetuating and self-devouring. The
very act of perceiving is in fact identified with the Will manifesting itself. The Will is
noumena, the thing-in—itself, the transcendent, irreducible, true reality. We can never
experience or even completely conceive of the Will outside of the phenomenal world
through which the Will "chooses”--is mysteriously motivated--to manifest itself. Nor

can we experience it or conceive of it in any terms other than the finite terms of our

 

"'Clark, Sources of Imagery, 55-77; SPCCifiC quote, 56-

“2 Beckmann was reading Arthur Schopenhauer well before the time of Trapeze.
His copy of Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena is inscribed ”To my dear Max
Beckmann, Minna [Beckmann], Christmas 1906,” and one of Beckmann's marginal
notes in The World as Will and Idea is dated 8 November 1919 (See Peter Beckmann
and Joachim Schaffer, eds. , Die Bibliothek Max Beckmanns: Unterstreichungen,
Kommentare, Notizen und Skizzen in seinen Bu'chern [Worms-am-Rhein: Wernische
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992], 73, 81). Dated marginal passages in Parerga continue
through the 19303 to 1940.

45

given modes of perception, our familiar human ways of organizing to our minds the
world in which we find ourselves-—as already stated, those very modes of perception,
those ways of organizing our world, are the Will manifesting itself. “3 Thus for our
human purposes, maintains Schopenhauer, ultimate reality is not to be sought outside
the world of appearances and experience, even though it exists, for any reality outside
of our limited, finite means of experience would, of course, be impossible to
experience, or know at any level, and so the very idea is meaningless. "If we go to
the bottom of the matter,” writes Schopenhauer, ”all truth and wisdom, in fact the
ultimate secret of things, is contained in everything actual, yet certainly only in
concreto and like gold hidden in the ore. The question is how to extract it.”‘“

This idea surely resonated for Beckmann, for throughout his career he
maintained a passionate devotion to figurative, objective art. To Reinhard Piper,
Beckmann remarked of the painting The Night,

What I aspire to is an ever more clear and definite form. I make no forms for
their own sake--as abnormal flourishes. Everything must remain concrete.”

Beckmann's lecture at the New Burlington Galleries made clear his purpose in

remaining concrete, and parallels Schopenhauer's metaphor of gold hidden in ore:

 

l“As Bryan Magee states it: ”There are no terms in which we can have any
apprehension of whatever exists other than through the categories made available to us
by what we are-—the categories of human sense, feeling, thought and so on, . . . Of
what exists as it is in itself [the Will, for example], independent of us and our
categories, we have no way of forming any conception” (Bryan Magee, The
Philosophy of Schopenhauer [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983], 83).

“‘Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J.
Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 2:72, quoted in Magee, 45 .

“‘Piper, 324.

 

pa:

IN

(I,

46

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called
reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible,
like the famous cabalist who once said: "If you wish to get hold of the invisible
you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible."“°
Spiritual bondage was one of Beckmann's major preoccupations, and it is
also an important aspect of Trapeze. The Will, according to Schopenhauer, manifests
itself in all objects and phenomena, but in human beings, as in other higher lifeforms,
it manifests especially as desire and incessant, aimless striving, which is never finally
satisfied. "The nature of satisfaction, enjoyment, and happiness,” writes
Schopenhauer, ”consists solely in the removal of a privation, the stilling of a
pain."“" All of nature exists for the sake of the Will feeding off itself, constantly
recreating itself, eternally willing. Thus our satisfactions are always temporary, only
to be replaced with new desires. We vacillate interrninably between urgent striving to
satisfy impoverishments of every sort and degree and restless emptiness when the
Will's willing is temporarily satiated, thus dissolving our only mode of living. We
are, according to Schopenhauer, bound and enslaved to perpetual suffering.”
Sexuality is one perpetrator of this bondage that Beckmann probes.
Schopenhauer considered sexuality simply the Will's means of preserving its continual
self-manifestation, a seductive urge that only sustains life's cruel cycle of desiring,

striving and suffering. He believed that our discomfiture concerning sexuality was

because at some level we view lovers as "the traitors who secretly strive to perpetuate

 

“‘Max Beckmann, ”On My Painting," in Lackner, 45-46.

1"Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne,
1:318, quoted in Magee, 219.

1“'See Magee, 219.

47

the whole trouble and toil that would otherwise rapidly come to an end."“9 Several
authors recognize a similar attitude in Beckmann's art, pointing to the artist's
treatment of sexuality as ensnarement or enslavement. Both Eberle and Fischer, for
instance, remark on such a treatment in the painting, The Night. Fischer actually
makes a direct connection to Schopenhauer's thought and calls the fundamental
relationship between attraction, desire and catastrophe one of Beckmann's "lifelong
themes.'”’° Schulz-Hoffmann calls attention to a persistent theme in Beckmann's
work that she labels unfreiheit--lack of freedom, or bondage. In Trapeze, for example,
she recognizes a "wheel of life" motif, apparently referring to the general counter-
clockwise, oval-shaped movement suggested by the figures. This wheel symbolizes the
”impossibility of free self-determination" and of "the open relationship of people
amongst each other.” Trapeze, says Schulz-Hoffmann, is also a picture of ”forced
sexual intercourse.” This she no doubt infers from the suggestive positioning of the
male trapezist over the blond female's upturned legs.m

Trapeze does indeed appear to be a picture of subjugation. The trapeze bar
stretches and pulls the vertical female trapezist against her will. Likewise, the man in
the upper right background is pulled relentlessy upward by the chain clenched in his

teeth, his hands helpless behind his back. The upside-down acrobat at top is trapped in

 

l”Schopenhauer, World as Will, 2:560, quoted in Kathleen M. Higgins, "Arthur
Schopenhauer,” in The Age of German Idealism, eds. Kathleen M. Higgins and Robert
C. Solomon, vol. 6 of Routledge History of Philosophy, eds. G. H. R. Parkinson and
S. G. Shanker, 354.

"°Fischer, 23.

l"Schulz-Hoffmann, 24.

48
a spinning polygonal ring. The bare-breasted woman below seems caught up helplessly
in the sweep of forces, rocked literally head over heels. Behind it all a masked
juggler, analogous to the three spinning Fates, tosses balls in a circle that matches the
"wheel" of hapless acrobats.152
For Schopenhauer, The Will is life's masked juggler. Our existence can

have no consoling purpose or meaning, our lives no real choice, as long as we are
merely instruments of an impersonal force. "Gone through in detail it has the
character of a comedy," writes Schopenhauer.

For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the

desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about

by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but

scenes from a comedy. . . . Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the

misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet

we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of

life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy."3
How apt, then, that Beckmann portrayed humanity bound in misery and ignorance as a
colorfully-costumed acrobatic troupe, put on stage for the entertainment of an
audience they cannot see beyond the footlights, bridled when they should be flying
freely, forlorn when they should exude lively cheer. At least one critic picked up on
this irony: ”This opposition between the joy of color and the sorrow of content,”

wrote Glassgold in 1927, "is evident in the greater part of his paintings from about

1920 to 1924.""‘ Equally significant, Beckmann uses the varieté motif, bringing

 

152Kessler believes inverted figures in Beckmann's work suggest "an extreme or
desperate fate,” and names Trapeze specifically (Kessler, 162 n. 10).

“Schopenhauer, World as Will, 1:322, quoted in Higgins, 353.
I"Glassgold, 246.

49

Schopenhauer's grim view of existence sharply home to his Weimar Republic
audience.

In his public pronouncements and private diaries, Beckmann's lifelong
obsession with the idea of an undying, unique, transcendent "Self" is evident.
Beckmann clings tenaciously to this concept of an indestructible Self, roughly
corresponding to the "soul," and it is often the sticking point in his disagreements with
philosophers and religious writers. Similarly, for all the Will's tyranny and
omniscience, Schopenhauer believed that a separate, peculiar, individual Self does
exist. Somehow this individual Self must penetrate the illusion of objectification
perpetrated by the Will-—for which Schopenhauer uses the Indian concept maja--and
ultimately deny the Will its machinations. Life then becomes a challenge to purify the
Self of all the Will's desiring, thus transcending the temporal prison the Will
constructs. "5 Art, aesthetics--the world as Idea, liberated from the world as Will,
according to Schopenhauer-43 both an escape from the pain of the struggle and a
means to enlightenment and redemption. Quite accurately, Zenser states, "Beckmann
stands to a great extent under the influence of this thinking."‘“ Belting agrees: "It is
in this intellectual tradition that Beckmann's notion of self as an almost sacred being is
rooted.”7

The soul chained unknowingly to a futile, wretched existence by an

uncomprehended force; the imperative to penetrate the fog of illusion and come to the

 

l”See Magee, 221-24.
l”Zenser, 3557.
l”Belting, 52.

50

truth, art leading the way; the individual spirit's grueling journey to freedom; this is
the foundation of Beckmann's weltanschauung. The religious systems of Theosophy
and Gnosticism give these concepts still richer dimensionality, and reveal T rapeze's

meaning yet more deeply.

Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine

The two religious systems most significant for analyzing Trapeze are
Helena P. Blavatsky's prodigious nineteenth-century work, The Secret Doctrine, and
Gnosticism. Of the three main sources under discussion, modern Beckmann scholars
write least of Blavatsky's writings, the principles of which are known as Theosophy.
Twohig and Fischer acknowledge the presence of her ideas in the artist's pantheon,
but only Clark spends considerable time treating this connection. Still, in her
exhaustive treatment of Beckmann's 1942 triptych, The Actors, including much
iconographical analysis, Clark discusses Blavatsky, Gnosticism and other esoteric
religions somewhat interchangeably."8 She does state categorically in her Frankfurt
exhibition catalog essay that "the views of Helena Blavatsky and Richard Wilhelm
contributed in great measure to the formulation of Beckmann' 3 ideas and that
awareness of Beckmann's sources helps the viewer of his paintings perceive more
deeply-lying layers of meaning.”‘”

Exactly when Beckmann first became acquainted with Blavatsky and

 

l"‘Clark, 77-99.
1’"Clark, "Beckmann's Abbilder," 37.

51

Gnosticism has been open to speculation. Beckmann's copy of Schopenhauer's
Parerga and Paralipomena contains a short treatise on Gnosticism that the artist
underlined.“° Beckmann's published library contains an edition of The Secret
Doctrine from 1920, though none of the copious marginal notes are dated earlier than
1935.“51 Two personal accounts, however, indicate that he was familiar with both
Blavatsky and Gnosticism at the time of Trapeze. In her autobiography, Beckmann's
second wife Quappi writes,

In earlier years Max had read lots of Western philosophy, but also was very

interested in Theosophy. He had studied the writings of Helena Blavatsky

thoroughly, which ultimately led him to Hindu philosophy and the "Vedas."162
This statement immediately follows, and is apparently meant to expand upon, an
anecdote about the couple discussing their spiritual beliefs just prior to their marriage
in 1925 (they had only met in 1923). Quappi's phrase "in earlier years," then, must
surely mean before their marriage, and so at least before the 19203. A former student
of Beckmann's, Marielouise Motesiczky, recalls that ”in those legendary days of the
twenties and thirties" the artist would expound on spiritual matters in the studio.163

She paraphrases his message: ”Perhaps from the beginning had the gods veiled the

meaning of the world, concerning which man, who already was God at one time, was

 

16"See Beckmann and Schaffer, 74. Recall this book was a 1906 gift from the
artist's wife.

161Beckmann and Schaffer, ”Blavatsky-Die Geheimlehre," 123-295.

“Mathilde Q. Beckmann, Mein Leben mit Max Beckmann (Munich: R. Piper and
Company Verlag, 1983), 136.

”Marielouise Motesiczky, "Max Beckmann als Lehrer: Erinnerungen einer
Schiilerin des Malers," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 January 1964.

52

gradually unveiling it. "‘5‘ This statement, as we shall learn, has decidedly Gnostic

overtones.

As Maria Carlson states in the opening sentences of her outline of
Theosophy,

The underlying premise of Theosophy is that there exists a single,
universal occult tradition (the Secret Doctrine), ancient but ageless, on which all
religions, past and present, are based. This ancient ”wisdom-tradition,” claim
Theosophists, unites religion, science, and philosophy into one grand synthesis
that explains everything: God, the Universe, Man, Being, and Creation.165

To a great extent, Helena Blavatsky based her book, The Secret Doctrine, on Eastem
religions, ancient Western mystery religions, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism and Western
occult beliefs. According to The Secret Doctrine, every human being's soul is a spark
emanating from the Divine Principle. This spark, called a monad, travels through
many lifetimes and many incarnations in a cycle, first downward into matter, and then
returning upward into the spiritual realm. These monads must experience every
possible form of existence, whether animate or inanimate, from the highest to the
lowest to the highest again, including human, during their nearly endless journey. This

Blavatsky calls ”the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul.'”°°

On its pilgrimage, the monad manifests itself in seven successive human

 

l“‘Ibid.

l‘5‘Maria Carlson, ”Theosophical Doctrine: An Outline," in "No Religion Higher
that Truth ": A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922, 114.
Carlson's work is the basis for my exposition of The Secret Doctrine.

16“H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and
Philosophy, vol. 1, Cosmogenesis, 6th (Olcott) ed. (Wheaton: Theosophical Press,
1952), 82.

53

"root races," only one of which we would actually recognize physically and
biologically as ”human being.” Presently the fourth human root race, or ”Aryan," is
manifested on Earth, marking the monad's lowest descent into matter.

Beckmann may have captured these concepts in the composition of the
painting Trapeze. The prominent juxtaposition of the upside-down male trapezist and
the upright female trapezist may symbolize the descending and ascending monads. The
entire complex of figures, as alluded to by Schulz-Hoffmann, seems to revolve
counterclockwise, down and up again in an elongated oval. According to The Secret
Doctrine, the Cosmos is initiated at each new great Period "by means of the two
contrary Forces, (the centripetal and the centrifugal Forces, which are male and
female, positive and negative, physical and spiritual, the two being one Primordial
Force), and thus causing it to become objective on the plane of illusion.”57
Beckmann may allude to these complementary forces, male and female, as well.
Trapeze, then, presents the moment of genesis--humanity and the world appear on the
cosmic stage. The curtain flap behind the tableau even suggests a birth canal.

In Trapeze there are seven figures, and careful extrapolation reveals the
suspended polygonal framework at top, in which the acrobat apparently turns, also to
be seven-sided. The number seven is highly significant in Blavatsky's system:
"Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is septenary," she tells

us.” This applies to the "Great Wheel” as well:

 

1‘57Blavatsky, 324.

l“"Blavatsky, 213. Pages 212-22 outline the septenary division of the universe in
detail.

54

the whole duration of our Cycle of Being, or Mahakalpa, i.e., the whole
revolution of our special Chain of seven planets [Globes] or Spheres from
beginning to end; the "Small Wheels” meaning the Rounds, of which there are
also seven.”

The polygon in Trapeze, then, may represent the human spirit fixed in the cosmic
cycle of incarnations.

The varieté motif is also appropriate to Beckmann's meaning. A consistent
theme of the Secret Doctrine is the material world's deceptive transience:

The Universe, with everything in it, is called Maya, because all is
temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a firefly to that of the sun.
Compared to the eternal immutability of the ONE, and the changelessness of
that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent everchanging forms, must be
necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher no better than a will-o'-the—wisp. Yet,
the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as
it is itself.”0

The rapid comings and goings on the varieté stage effectively embody the human
monad's fleeting existences.

Just as Schopenhauer felt the secrets of existence were "like gold hidden in
the ore,” so Beckmann believed that the spiritual in art should be grounded in material
reality. Theosophy validates Beckmann's approach as well. For example, The Secret
Doctrine establishes the relationship between the spiritual and the material:

Noumena and phenomena are connected by analogy and correspondence. Events
in matter are distorted, at times parodic, even grotesque reflections of events
occuring on the spiritual plane. The noumenon is enciphered in the phenomenal
event, and the occultist who has developed his "spiritual sight" can see behind

the distorted pseudoreality of the manifested mechanical Universe to the real
meaning of the noumenon that informs it.171

 

169Ibid., 113 n. 1.
I70Blavatsky, 317.
”‘Carlson, 124.

55

Trapeze is a distortion and a parody of a varieté acrobatic number, and so perhaps an
apparition of unseen, otherworldly afflictions.

Certainly Beckmann counts himself as one whose ”spiritual sight" is
developed enough to see such things. It has been suggested that the figure beneath the
trapezists is Beckmann himself presenting the truth to wretched mankind. If the
trapezists represent the descent into and emergence out of material existence in a
Theosophical sense, we can also consider this small self-portrait as the "pilgrim"
figure Blavatsky describes in The Secret Doctrine. ”The Pilgrim," writes Blavatsky,
”having struggled through and suffered in every form of life and being, is only at the
bottom of the valley of matter, and halfway through his cycle, when he has identified
himself with collective Humanity."172 The Theosophic pilgrim, we shall discover,

has a significant counterpart in the doctrines of Gnosticism, as well as in Trapeze.

Gnosticism

"Beckmann's worldview can be characterized overall as Gnostic," is

Friedhelm Fischer's categorical statement.173 Along with Schopenhauer's philosophy

and Madame Blavatsky's The Seceret Doctrine, Gnosticism is the most important

 

172Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol.1 (New York: Theosophical Publishing
Company, 1888), xx, quoted in Carlson, 231-32.

mFischer, 19 n. 21. Clark and Fischer give extensive consideration to Gnosticism
in Beckmann's art, as does Twohig in her Carnival monograph. As stated earlier,
Clark is quite attentive to esoteric religions in general as they appear in Beckmann,
but never exhaustively surveys an object for its manifold correlations to one particular
system. Twohig's reading of Carnival is first and foremost Gnostic, and indicates

specific iconography.

56

source for analyzing Trapeze. Gnosticism is a religious system with Hellenistic Greek
origins whose greatest activity was during Christianity's earliest centuries.”‘ It posits
a divine Realm of Light, the realm of God, from which life has not emanated or
descended as part of a cycle, but fallen.” What has fallen specifically are sparks of
the godhead, called pneuma; pneuma comprise the human soul.

These immaterial, divine entities from the Realm of Light have fallen into
matter, into the physical cosmos. According to Gnosticism, the cosmos was
consciously created as by an evil force, the Demiurge, as a trap and a prison for the
pneuma. Spiritually asleep, numbed or intoxicated, men are ignorant of their divine
origin, unwitting jailers for the pneuma that longs for reunion with God in the Realm
of Light. All creation is alienated from God, who, compounding the predicament, is
both unknown and unknowable by any natural means. Only revealed knowledge, or
gnosis, can awaken humanity to its own divinity and inspire longing for the Realm of
Light. A redeeming messenger-called the "Alien Messenger”--is sent into the cosmos
bringing the gnosis, emancipating the pneuma, teaching the soul the return path to the
godhead.

It is most likely a conflation of roles as the Pilgrim-Soul—-the monad-—of
Blavatsky's work, and the Gnostic Alien Messenger, that Beckmann plays in Trapeze.

The acrobat in brown-and-orange-striped costume, upside-down in the polygon at the

 

”‘See Hans Jonas, ”Introduction: East and West in Hellenism,” in The Gnostic
Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1958), 3-27.

l7’My exposition of Gnosticism is based on Jonas's book, especially ”Abstract of
Main Gnostic Tenets,” 42—48, and "Gnostic Imagery and Symbolic Language," 48-99.

57

top of Trapeze, resembles Beckmann partially, though it is not an exact self-portrait,
and as suggested earlier, one can read this polygonal framework as a wheel. The
Gnostic Alien Messenger reappears many times, in many different forms, throughout
history until his mission is completed, a concept well-symbolized by the acrobat
turning in the wheel.” It has also been noted that the wheel in Trapeze is
septagonal. Correspondingly, the Alien Messenger of the Gnostic texts must penetrate
the seven layers of the cosmos, represented by the then-known seven planets, each one
guarded by a minion of the Demiurge.177 Awareness that one is not truly of this
world, but is in fact godly and far from home, brings loneliness and longing. The
Alien Messenger feels this no less than those he reaches. If Trapeze is viewed upside-
down this acrobat-emissary, wearing a forlorn expression, appears to be shouldering
the tubular framework like a heavy load, recalling Hausenstein's characterization of
Beckmann as a ”pack-carrier” who " groans under the burden.”

Sexual connotations in Trapeze further its connection to Gnosticism. Hans
Jonas tells us that "The main weapon of the world in its great seduction is 'love'.”""
In one Gnostic text Adam, the first man and tribal head of the Sons of Light,
personifies the divine sparks' fettering in the material cosmos. The evil planetary
forces plot to introduce in Adam the fleshly pleasures:

'We will practice embracing in the world and found a community in the

 

”“1 wandered through worlds and generations,” says the redeemer in the Mandaen
Gnostic text. "How long have I endured already and been dwelling in the world!" is
the cry in another (Jonas, 53).

mJonas, 43, 77.

17“Ibid. , 72.

58

world. . . . Let us practice the mysteries of love and seduce the whole

world!’ . . . They took the head of the tribe and practiced on him the mystery of

love and of lust, through which all the worlds are inflamed. They practiced on

him seduction, through which all worlds are seduced.I79
In Beckmann's painting, the male trapezist seemingly "falls" into the blond female
trapezist's proferred sexuality. It is also possible that the woman is actually pulling
him downward. Her exposed breast further implies erotic temptation, for in
Beckmann's 1917 etching Adam and Eve (Figure 33), it is not the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge which Eve offers Adam, but rather her bare breast. Much as was seen in

regard to the ideas of Schopenhauer, then, Trapeze links sexuality with tragedy in a

Gnostic context as well.“°

 

179Ibid.

1”An image linking sexuality and the wheel motif appears in "Tightrope Walkers,”
an etching from Beckmann's 1921 portfolio, The Yearly Fair. A hooded male
tightrope walker totters blindly toward a female who lifts her leg high above her head,
her groin pointed directly at the hooded man. Her groin is also centered on the hub of
the background Ferris wheel. Similarly, the male trapezist's groin in Trapeze
corresponds to the hub of the septagonal ”wheel" atop the tableau. Ingrid Schulze
makes thought-provoking explorations of sexual meanings in The Yearly Fair and
other Beckmann works in "Jahrmarkt-Metapher, Tiersatire und 'verkehrte Welt' bei
Max Beckmann,” Bildende Kunst no. 4 (1989): 35-37; and ”Zirkus, Karussell und
Schaubude: Ein Beitrag zu Max Beckmanns Graphikmappe Der Jahrmarkt,” Bildende
Kunst, no. 8 (1990): 60-63.

CONCLUSION

Trapeze is a model artifact of Weimar Republic painting. Its subject, the
varieté, is a quintessential phenomenon of 19203 German city life, and T rapeze's
acrobatic act follows the modern German (and European) artistic tradition of the circus
motif. The painting satisfies a number of Weimar Republic critics' standards for
proper Germandom, as well. For one, Beckmann overlays a determinedly objective
style with a spiritual content. Some critics, as well, believed that Beckmann's art
consciously reflected the uneasy days.

It is doubtful that Trapeze's mood of distress and paralysis refers directly
to events and circumstances in the degree Beckmann's earliest postwar graphic works
did. Instead, Beckmann's Germany abets and confirms an already-established tragic
worldview. But his audience was surely sensitive to the diffuse psychic bewilderment
in the land, and when Beckmann uses the varieté motif, so contemporary and
immediate, he indicates solemnly to his fellows that the signs of the larger affliction
are all around them.

Trapeze also crystallizes an interval in the artist's inner journey. Beckmann
had suffered a breakdown while serving as a field hospital orderly during the war, and
Eberle characterizes Beckmann's imagery immediately following his wartime release

from a sanitarium as a search to find "a new and personally genuine approach to the

59

60

fundamental questions of human existence for which philosophy and theology could no
longer provide answers.”1 The early postwar paintings and prints are especially
strident and tortured. In Self-Portrait with Red Scarf (Figure 33) Beckmann appears
nearly mad, feverish with his disturbing vision and purpose. The Night culminates the
artist's most drastic and sinister pictures. As the postwar years progress, a less
alarmed mood prevails. Self-Portrait as a Clown exudes sobriety, purposefulness and
authority, and one senses that Beckmann is facing and accepting the truth of our
human condition, as he sees it.”2 From this he now gains inner healing and strength,
and a mission to lead others on the path.183

Stylistic changes at this time reflect the evolution from shock and
confusion to the resolute pursuit of an integrated metaphysical picture of things.
Beckmann's postwar works comprise sharp edges, compressed space and jagged planes
in multiple, skewed perspectives. They appear frenetic and convulsed, often
overcrowded. By the mid-19203, Beckmann's figures are full-bodied and more simply
treated, their light and dark facets contrasting sharply. The compositions are generally
spare, the atmosphere more spacious and unified. Sharp edges and conflicting

perspective planes are gone. Colors are brighter and more pervasive, and a certain

 

"“Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beclonann,
Schlemmer (New Haven: Yale University, 1985), 89.

‘”By 1927, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, closely bound with the views of his essay,
”The Artist in the State," shows a long-recovered Beckmann at his most confident and

imposing.

”Heinrich Simon wrote of Beckmann in a 1919 essay, ”Only the ever-wandering,
the never-content, the ever-dying and newly-becoming are they who are called to
service in the Most Holy (Heinrich Simon, ”Max Beckmann,” Das Kunstblatt 3
[September, 1919]: 257).

61

otherworldly quiet suffuses the pictures!“ In general they are clear, full of
conviction and seemingly untroubled at heart, despite their sometimes disturbing
subjects. Trapeze exhibits the beginnings of these trends. These works of the mid—
twenties, such as Mardi Gras (Figure 34) and The Barge (Figure 35), reflect
equivalent characteristics in the artist's inner life as his many philosophical and
religious influences coalesce into a more or less coherent weltanschauung.

To a great extent Schopenhauer, Blavatsky and Gnosticism describe this
weltanschauung, and Trapeze synthesizes these schools. The painting, then, lucidly
articulates the artist's early 19203 beliefs, as he emerged from his spiritual wilderness:
that mankind is ignorant of its divine essence and must somehow recover its true
inheritance. To do so, the world must recognize that illusory material life masks,
hides, and diverts the truth, and keeps us imprisoned in fruitless suffering. Beckmann,
as an artist, has the vision as well as the lonely duty to initiate souls to the journey.

One can debate how literally Beckmann's iconography can be read. Calling
Beckmann's convictions "intuitive and thoroughly unsystematic,” Margot Clark
summarizes his relationship to Gnosticism as follows:

Essentially, I think the gnostic [sic] material appealed to Beckmann because it
offered an ample range of metaphor, from which he selected (probably not
consciously and certainly not self-consciously) images that 'worked'
compositionally and that spoke to him of what it felt like to live in the material

world, not because any one gnostic system furnished a ready-made truth. He
consequently felt free to combine the imagery of several gnostic systems or to

 

”Concerning all these elements, contrast Carnival and Double-Portrait Carnival,
Max Beckmann and Quappi, both of 1925, with Carnival of 1920.

62

include references to other sources altogether, . . 3"”
Without doubt, Beckmann's sources are extensive and eclectic. But I believe that as
one becomes familiar with the philosophies and religions which interested Beckmann,
with his reactions to and dialogues with them, as well as with his personal
pronouncements, certain commonalities arise; it is possible to serviceably outline his
belief system.

Beckmann drew on a large range of metaphors, some more exactly
corresponding to a doctrine or canon than others. But I don't believe, as Clark states,
that his choices were entirely intuitive or unconscious. Beckmann's books, particularly
the major religious and philosphical works, are full of thoughtful, frequently
passionate marginal notes. He often addresses Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Blavatsky
by name in these notes, applauding or chiding them as the case may be, but always
engaging them. When Blavatsky gives complex calculations for the time durations of
the different creation cycles, Beckmann works out the math in his margins.“5 It is
doubtful Beckmann believed completely or literally in any of these systems, but he
appears to have taken them quite seriously. This attitude, and the fact that he regularly
addressed the authors on very specific points, indicates to me that the painter was
more than capable of consciously choosing specific iconography to illustrate peculiar

aspects of a system. I certainly believe this was true in instances for Trapeze, when

 

18’Clark, ”Beckmann's Abbilder des metaphysicischen 'Selbst'.” In Max
Beckmann: Frankfurt 1915-1933: Eine Ausstellung zum 100. Geburtstag, Klaus
Gallwitz, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Stadtische Galerie in Stadelschen Kunstinstitut,
1983), 37; Clark, Sources of Imagery, 94.

1"See for example Beckmann and Schaffer, 115, 129, 132 and 264.

63

Blavatsky was still new territory for him. The odd choice of a septagonal wheel—
motif, for example, could hardly be capricious. It seems only natural to me that
Beckmann would "try out" some of the new ideas in his paintings, the ideas which
were such a part of his newly-recovered conviction and direction.

In 1919, awaiting the first glimmers of dawn during his dark night of the

soul, Beckmann wrote,

This is my crazy hope that I cannot give up, and that in spite of everything is
stronger in me than ever. To someday make buildings together with my pictures.
To build a tower in which humanity can proclaim all its rage and despair, all its

meager hope and wild longing. A new church. Perhaps the time is helping
me.”7

Trapeze is a significant icon in Beckmann's church.

 

“’Beckmann, ”Schopferische Konfession," 66.

 

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A

FIGURES

 

Figure l - Max Beckmann, Trapeze, 1923, oil on canvas. Toledo, Toledo Museum of
Art.

64

65

 

 

Figure 2 - Beckmann, Martyrdom, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph.

 

 

 

«3M6 ..

I¢\\ M...

 

Figure 3 - Beckmann, The Holdouts, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph.

67

”1.11 y a J. .../ 1.]; . [I 1,13%...“
.2 ) VIM?

  

. ,. t... .L . t . .. . . , .
I x \\ r a u . byte. 4 9
. . v .
. e .. e 4 J . r [fl
.. . a . .
. . ,.,, s, ,. .1 l 4/
I t a t. r . t
. .. . v}.
. Kn... . .i c
. .:u

$.13.

I

/.

. a .

: L4

... .. )1... {Pay .

. Jetoh E
-sffluw»... v

II

/
w

     

We?
eel;

II/l

   

  

, The Ideologues, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph.

- Beckmann

Figure 4

68

,.,.. ,/
T? ”J“ I/_\
u’g': /i ,/’,/ .

‘ 0",” ‘- V . --
d't ?/ e’" ’ ’
. . l Man
’1» .. \
. ‘ -. . - ‘

 

Figure 5 - Beckmann, Hunger, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph.

69

 

Figure 6 - Beckmann, The Way Home, from the portfolio Hell, 1919, lithograph.

70

 

lithograph.

’

from the portfolio Hell, 1919

Beckmann, The Street,

Figure 7

71

 

 

Figure 8 - Beckmann, The Night, 1918, oil on canvas. Diisseldorf, Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen.

72

 

Figure 9 - Beckmann, Carnival, 1920, oil on canvas. London, Tate Gallery.

 

Figure 10 - Beckmann, The Dream, 1921, oil on canvas. St. Louis, Saint Louis Art

Museum.

74

 

, Staatsgalerie modemer Kunst.

9

”I1

 

Figure 11 - Beckmann, Dance in Baden-Baden, 1923, oil on canvas. Munich,
Bayerische “‘ ‘ g '

 

Figure 12 - Erich Heckel, Four Female Dancers in Black, Dresden, 1911, pen and
colored pencil. Hamburg, Altonaer Museum.

76

 

Figure 13 - Ludwig Kirchner, Female Varieté Dancers, 1909, India ink and colored
crayon. Hamburg, Altonaer Museum.

77

 

Figure 14 - Kirchner, Panama Girls, 1910, oil on canvas. Raleigh, North Carolina
Museum of Art, Wilhelm R. Valentiner Collection.

78

 

Figure 15 - Paul Kleinschmidt, Dressing Room, 1929, oil on canvas. Ulmer, Ulmer
Museum.

79

 

.tamzam otoawmagm

.5925 23:8 =0 .6 .82 .Eeek wEaEQ “SSE .fieaomEoE - 2 053.;

/~ . , ,1, x .

.3. .. // a

80

 

Figure 17 - Kleinschmidt, Large Female Circus Rider, 1927, oil on canvas. Private
Collection.

81

 

I:igure 18 - Kleinschmidt, Small Female Circus Rider, 1927, oil on canvas. Stuttgart,
Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart.

 

Figure 19 - Kleinschmidt, Coffee Concert, 1925, oil on canvas. Regensburg,
Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg.

83

 

 

 

 

Figure 20 - Beckmann, The Barker, from the portfolio The Yearly Fair, drypoint,
1921.

 

Figure 21 - Georg Tappert, Can-Can, 1911, oil on canvas.

85

 

, 1914, oil on canvas.

Two Female Dancers

’

Tappert

Figure 22 -

86

 

Figure 23 - Tappert, The Negress Nyassa with Conch Shell, 1929, oil on canvas.

87

1%
.- “la; »

’y

I’Sr 5Q
-‘é:£“‘ ~
. a-“

’3 “a
n

~~

t
.x ‘2
‘ ..
; ‘.
J I . g
T \
\h

.1

'r

 

Figure 24 - Tappert, Young Acrobat Woman, 1928, oil on canvas.

88

 

. ' "r '
o..s.-_-~_o‘._" wm.»-.

Figure 25 - Karl Hofer, The Brothers, 1921, oil on canvas. Gelsenkirchen, Stadtisches
Museum Gelsenkirchen.

89

 

Figure 26 - Beckmann, Self-Portrait as a Clown, 1921, oil on canvas. Wuppertal,
Von der Heydt-Museum der Stadt Wuppertal.

 

1921, oil on canvas. Private Collection.

9

Figure 27 - Hofer, Circus People

91

 

Figure 28 - Hofer, Tiller Girls, 1923, oil on canvas. Emden, Kunsthalle Emden,
Stiftung Henri Nannen.

 

Figure 29 - Beckmann, Descent from the Cross, 1917, oil on canvas. New York,
Museum of Modern Art.

93

 

Beckmann, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1917, oil on canvas.

Figure 30 -

St. Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum.

r if ' .
-.'/ 1271' Z

 

Figure 31 - Beckmann, Family Picture, 1920, oil on canvas. New York, Museum of

Modern Art.

 

Figure 32 - Beckmann, Adam and Eve, 1917, drypoint.

96

 

 

Figure 33 - Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Red Scan“, 1917, oil on canvas. Stuttgart,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

l

‘I {es-v5.5:

 

Figure 34 - Beckmann, Mardi-Gras, 1925, oil on canvas. Mannheim, Stadtische
Kunsthalle Mannheim.

98

 

Figure 35 - Beckmann, The Barge, 1926, oil on canvas. Bedford, New York, Mr. and
Mrs. Richard L. Feigen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allport, Gordon. "Germany's State of Mind.” The New Republic 34 (14 March 1923):
63-65.

Beckmann, Mathilde Q. Mein Leben mit Max Beckmann. Munich: R. Piper and
Company Verlag, 1983.

Beckmann, Max. "Schopferische Konfession.” T ribu"ne der Kunst und Zeit, no. 13
(1920): 61-67.

Beckmann, Peter, and Joachim Schaffer, eds. Die Bibliothek Max Beckmanns:
Unterstreichungen, Kommentare, Notizen und Skizzen in seinen Bt'lchern.
Worms-am-Rhein: Wernische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992.

Belting, Hans. Max Beckmann. New York: Timken, 1989.

Riemann, Georg. ”Kunstwende: Die neue Kunst als soziologisch-psychologisches
Problem.” Jahrbuch derjungen Kunst (1921): 281-290.

Blavatsky, H. P. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and
Philosophy. Vol. 1, Cosmogenesis. 6th (Olcott) ed. Wheaton: Theosophical
Press, 1952.

Brandes, George. "Germany Today.” New Republic 32 (11 November 1922): 326-
328.

Buenger, Barbara. ”Max Beckmann's Ideologues: Some Forgotten Faces.” Art Bulletin
71 (September 1989): 453-479.

Carlson, Marie. "No Religion Higher that Truth ": A History of the Theosophical
Movement in Russia, [875-1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Clark, Margot Orthwein. Max Beckmann: Sources of Imagery in the Hermetic
Tradition. Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1975.

------ . ”Beckmann's Abbilder des metaphysischen 'Selbst'.” In Max Beclonann:
Frankfurt 1915-1933: Eine Ausstellung zum 100. Geburtstag, edited by Klaus

99

1* .

100

Gallwitz, et al. Frankfurt am Main: Stadische Galerie im Stadelschen Kunstinstitut,
1983.

Dahlke, Paul. Die Bedeutung des Buddhismus fur unsere Zeit. Munich: Oskar SchoB
Verlag, 1924.

Eberle, Matthias. "Neue Wirklichkeit, Surrealismus und Neue Sachlichkeit." In
T endenzen der Zwanzingen Jahre. Berlin: Dietrich Reiner Verlag, 1977.

------ . World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann, Schlemmer. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Elster, Hanns Martin. "Die Lage des deutschen Geistes in der Gegenwart.” Die Horen
2 (1926): 1-4.

EBwein, Hermann. ”Max Beckmann.” Der neue Merkur 7 (October 1923-March
1924): 325-330.

Eyck, Erich. A History of the Weimar Republic. Translated by Harlan P. Hanson and
Robert G. L. Waite. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Fischer, F riedhelm. Max Beclanann: Symbol und Weltbild: Grundrifl zu einer Deutung
des Gesamtwerkes. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972.

Fraenger, Wilhelm, et al. Max Beckmann. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1924.
------ . Max Beckmann: Briefe. Vol. 1, 1899-1925. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1993.

Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper and Row,
1968.

Glaser, Curt. "Max Beckmann." Kunst und Kunstler 21 (August 1923): 311-314.

Glaser, Paul. ”Beckmann: zu der Ausstellung bei Paul Cassirer." Berliner Bdrsen-
Courier, 6 January 1924.

Glassgold, C. Adolph. "Max Beckmann.” The Arts 11 (May 1927): 241-247.
Gooch, George P. Germany. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927.
Giinther, Ernst. Geschichte des Variete’s. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978.

Hausenstein, Wilhelm. ”Zum Thema: Die Situation der Kunst." Die neue Rundschau
34 (March 1923): 212-227.

101

Helmreich, Ernst Christian. The German Churches under Hitler: Background,
Struggle, and Epilogue. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979.

Hermann-NeiBe, Max. Kabarett: Schriften zum Kabarett und zur bildende Kunst.
Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1988.

Higgins, Kathleen M. "Arthur Schopenhauer." In The Age of German Idealism, edited
by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. Vol. 6 of Routledge History of
Philosophy, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson and S. G. Shanker. London:
Routledge, 1993.

Hofer, Josef, and Karl Rahner, eds. Lexikon filr Theologie und Kirche. Freiberg:
Herder, 1957.

Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings
of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Kessler, Charles. Max Beckmann's T riptychs. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1970.

Kfippers, Paul Erich. "Die neue Religion der kfinstlerischen Jugend.” Jahrbuch der
jungen Kunst (1922): 255-263.

Lackner, Stephen. Max Beckmann: Memories of a Friendship. Coral Gables:
University of Miami Press, 1969.

Laquer, Walter Z. Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.

Landau, Rom. ”Max Beckmann. " In Der Unbestechliche Minos: Kritik an der
Zeitkunst. Hamburg: Harder Verlag, 1925.

Iania, Leo. Today We Are Brothers: The Biography of a Generation. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1942.

Lipps-Kant, Barbara. Paul Kleinschmidt: 1883-1949. Ph.D. diss., Universitat
Tfibingen, 1974.

------ . ”Wer ist Paul Kleinschmidt?" In Paul Kleinschmidt: 1883-1949. Ulm: Ulmer
Museum, 1978.

102

Lloyd, Jill. German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991.

Magee, Bryan. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

Meier-Graefe, Julius. "Unsere Kunst nach dem Kriege." Die neue Rundschau 34 (May
1923): 394-405.

------ . Die Kunst unserer T age: Von Cézanne bis heute. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1927.
Mitchell, Langdon. "Germany." Atlantic Monthly 131 (April 1923): 534-543.

Motesiczky, Marielouise. ”Max Beckmann als Lehrer: Erinnerungen einer Schfilerin
des Malers.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 January 1964.

Piper, Reinhard. Mein Leben als Verleger: Vomtittag-Nachmittag. Munich: R. Piper
Verlag, 1964.

Richardson, John. Modern Art and Scientific Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1971.

Rigby, Ida Katherine. Karl Hofer. New York: Garland, 1976.

Scheffler, Karl. "Max Beckmann.” Kunst und Kunstler 22 (February 1924): 107-110.
Schilling, Jiirgen. Karl Hofer. Unna: Unna Kreise, 1991.

Schmidt, Paul F. "Max Beckmann." Der Cicerone 11 (31 October 1919): 675-684.

------ . "Neue Graphik von Max Beckmann.” Jahrbuch derjungen Kunst (1923): 411-
416.

------ . "Die Kunst unserer Tage.” Jahrbuch derjungen Kunst (1924): 353-373.

Schremmer, Ernst. ". . . und zwingt sie, schbn zu sein: der Maler Paul
Kleinschmidt. " In Paul Kleinschmidt: 1883-1949: Wlde, Aquarelle,
Zeichnungen, und Druckgraphik. Stuttgart: Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, 1983.

Schulze, Ingrid. ”Jahrmarkt-Metapher, Tiersatire und 'verkehrte Welt' bei Max
Beckmann." Bildende Kunst, no. 4 (1989): 35-37.

------ . "Zirkus, Karussell und Schaubude: Ein Beitrag zu Max Beckmanns
Graphikmappe Der Jahrmarkt.” Bildende Kunst, no. 8 (1990): 60-63.

Schulz-Hoffmann, Carla. ”Gitter, Fessel, Maske: Zum Problem der Unfreiheit im

103

Werk von Max Beckmann." In Max Beckmann: Retrospektive, edited by Carla
Schulz-Hoffmann and Judith C. Weiss. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1984.

Selz, Peter. Max Beckmann. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964.
Simon, Heinrich. "Max Beckmann.” Das Kunstblatt 3 (September 1919): 257-264.

Snyder, Louis L. The Weimar Republic: A History of Germany from Ebert to Hitler.
Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1966.

Swarzenski, Georg. ”Um Max Beckmann.” Das neue Frankfurt 1, no. 4 (1924): 78-
85.

Twohig, Sarah O'Brien. Beclanann: "Carnival". London: Tate Gallery, 1984.

Wietek, Gerhard. Georg T appert: 1880-195 7: Ein Wegbereiter der deutschen
Moderne. Munich: Verlag Karl Thiemig, 1980.

Zenser, Hildegard. ”Das 'Ich' als groBtes Geheimnis des Lebens.” Weltkunst 6 (1
November 1990): 3556—3561.

"‘llllllllllllllllllllllllll