Max Beckmann and the Australian-USA ‘art gulf'

Beckmann's Synagogue in Frankurt am Main  

It’s a paradox, Modern German painting is almost completely unrepresented in Australian Public collections but Modernist Australian painters were profoundly influenced by German modernists, especially Max Beckmann.

Not so in the United States where German Modernism is richly represented, taught and appreciated.

So what happened? Why does German art remain almost completely unknown in Australia? Is the chance to see these works firsthand the main reason for the huge crowds that continue to visit the European Masters (which, as more than a few astute observers have pointed out, is advertised across the country by images of French impressionism).

Were it not for the USA’s interest and holdings it might be something as simple as two World Wars, but as ArtsHub explored during and extended interview with scholar and Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV, Dr Ted Gott, it’s not that simple.

Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished curators and scholars in our public collections Ted Gott who, as well as the current Staedel museum exhibition (European Masters, head curator Felix Kramer), co-curated the phenomenally successful Dali show in 2009 (Salvador Dali: Liquid Desires) and was the curatorial force behind the major exhibition of French Symbolist Odilon Redon’s graphic works at NGV (The enchanted stone: the graphic worlds of Odilon Redon).

Gott’s two-part interview on Dali remains one of the most read and accessed visual art features published on ArtHub. This current feature is excerpted from an extended interview with Tedd Gott and will also run in two parts on ArtsHub. The first of these focuses on Max Beckmann.

One of the most powerful and deeply disquieting paintings in the exhibition, presaging the horrors of National Socialism, is Beckmann’s the Synagogue in Frankfurt am Main:(1919), which was burnt to the ground by the Nazi’s, on 9 November 1938. By that time Beckmann had been removed as head of the Staedel School, and was living in exile in Amsterdam, his work denounced by the Nazi’s as “degenerate art”.

The ensuing analysis of why Beckmann’s art was lionised in the USA but ignored in England and Australia is as much a sobering recollection of the destructive tyranny of Hilter’s war against “the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration” as it is an insight into the assertive rise and resistance of US cultural ideology which continues to this day.

Australia has a place in this story but it is at best a comparative and peripheral footnote in the narrative of 20th century Modernism. Yet Beckmann exerted a profound influence on progressive Australian artists (Nolan, Tucker), particular those associated with John and Sunday Reed’s Heide, where the latest art journals were on hand.

ArtsHub: Why is German art so underrepresented in Australian public collections. Is it a colonial echo of a national rivalry?

Ted Gott: Definitely. We were quite Germanic in our outlook in the 19th century (at NGV). Our first caretaker was Eugene von Guerard (Master in the NGV painting school, 1870-1881) of course and our first and second directors (George Frederick Folingsby, 1882-1891; Lindsay Bernard Hall, 1892-1935) were trained in Germany.

There was strong representation of German and Scandinavian art in the 1880-90s. It is really the First World War that changed our collecting policies - not just here but also in Sydney and other capitals somewhat jingoistically. The German art was taken off the walls. That’s why we stopped colleting after 1914, which is a shame - we all missed out on German expressionism.

AH: So what was collected then?

TG: Instead we collected what was regarded as cutting edge British paintings. Some very good works (displayed recently in the NGV exhibition Modern Britain, 1990-1960). And we bought Impressionism and the odd contemporary French work (Picasso and Matisse were acquired after the second world war).

We almost aggressively did not buy German art and I find that interesting because in America there was aggressive acquisition as a cultural slap in the face to Nazism.

AH: And how does Beckmann play into this?

TG: Max Beckmann,( who had been denounced as a degenerate artist by the Nazis) had a flourishing career in the USA. His first solo show was in 1928, with another big show in ’38.

Even though trapped in occupied Holland and under Gestapo surveillance he still has successful shows in the USA. He had dealers, J.B .(also known as Israel bar) Neumann and Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery in New York who showed his work. Many of these works were already in the States before the outbreak of war.

He had a young collector Stephan Lackner who he met in ’33, who bought dozens of paintings from him and he paid Beckmann a monthly stipend for a 2 year period in exchange for 2 paintings.

Lackner is the son a German Jewish business man who wisely took his family to Paris in ‘34 and California in ‘39, one step ahead of the Nazi. So Stephan Lackner ends up in California in 1939 with a collection of about 100 Max Beckmann’s which he proceeds to lend to public and commercial galleries and he puts Beckmann in prizes. Beckmann wins a $100 prize in San Francisco but does not even know.

He is lucky to have this young man promoting his art. Even before war breaks out, there is a trend in American art criticism with the view that it is distinctly American to promote Max Beckmann because this artist - and others like him - had been denounced and persecuted by Fascism. It’s the America way to buy Max Beckmann. We definitively did not have that in Australia.

AH: Such an astonishingly different cultural outlook given the rising feelings against Germany in England at exactly the same time.

TG: Max Beckmann goes to London in 1938 where Herbert Read (1893-1968, critic and editor of the Burlington Magazine 1933-39) stages a big exhibition of art, which is a deliberate riff on the Degenerate Art show of the preceding summer in Germany.

They gather 200 works by all the degenerate artists and its is a highly successful show (Exhibition of 20th Century German Art, 1938; co-organised with Kenneth Clark and Irmgard Burchard). Beckmann comes across with Lackner and Beckmann gives his famous lecture, which becomes his book On my painting.

Despite all of this Beckmann does not sell a single painting in London. So there is political and critical support and ideological sympathy for “degenerate’ artists but no sales.

Fortunately he had Lackner to pay his stipend. But that stopped with the outbreak of war and communications were cut off (Beckmann was caught in Amsterdam). Lackner continued to promote Beckmann not knowing if he is alive. Amazingly Beckmann still received support and commissions from Germany.

There is a German art dealer called Günter Franke who bought paintings from him and has them smuggled back into Germany by Beckmann’s son who was working as a medical orderly and visits his father from Germany driving an ambulance. On his way back he smuggles them in.

AH: that was incredibly dangerous....

TG: Absolutely. He tells ten border police they are theatrical backdrops not degenerate art. For Gunter Franke, (what is a dealer doing buying ‘degenerate” art in the middle of Nazi Germany?) it could have been an instant death sentence. Hitler had even suspended art criticism in the middle of 1936.

AH: This make me think that the Nazi Degenerate Art Show drew a line in the sand, a division that allowed “degenerate” artists to have a place in post-war cultural life unsullied by Nazism.

TG: That’s an interesting point.

AH:And similar in a way, to how the USA asserted itself culturally and politically in the 1936 Berlin Olympics that infuriated Hitler…

TG: Jesse Owen… (Hitler stormed out when the great African-American athlete Jesse Owen won gold in the summer games.)

AH: Coming back to the art, this distaste seems to be reciprocal. There’s no British art in the Staedel collection. Is that Polico-cultural or just taste?

TG: German artists were very interested in Constable and Turner and it’s interesting that some of the Nazarene artists in the Staedel collection had come in contact with Turner’s work in Rome in the first decade of 19th century. There’s definitely an influence. For example through the British influence on Courbet and French Realism and also on the Impressionists.

AH: Were there broader cultural antipathies at play between the two empires (as they were then)?

TG: There could have been. But we forget how German Britain was. The Royal family was German only subsuming the names Battenberg and Sax-Coburg under the House of Windsor during WW1. But I really cannot answer why the Staedel did not collect British art. It certainly had nothing to do with the physical mobility of paintings. Even in the 1880s hundreds of paintings came to Australia.

The second part of this interview will focus on a small group of paintings selected by Ted Gott for their particular cultural and artistic significance.