The Städel Museum in Frankfurt Presents “Max Beckmann & America”

Written by Heinrich Wenderoth Tuesday, 11 October 2011 20:34

Frankfurt, Germany.- Frankfurt’s Städel Museum presents Max Beckmann’s condensed late work against the background of the last years of his life and his artistic production in the USA in a major special exhibition starting on October 7th and remaining on view until January 2012. With more than 110 exhibits, including fifty paintings as well as numerous drawings, watercolors, printed graphic works, and sculptures, the show “Beckmann & America” offers a comprehensive survey of this important artist’s fascinating last creative period. After living and teaching in St. Louis from 1947 on, Beckmann finally moved to New York where he also accepted a teaching position and where he died walking through the city in 1950. From the point of view of the artist’s evolution, these years on American soil were decisive: marking a new beginning for and a further development in his work, they will be the subject of a monographic exhibition for the first time.

For Frankfurt am Main, where Beckmann lived, worked, and taught at the Städel School from 1915 to 1933, this project is of special importance: the Städel Museum boasts a rich collection of paintings, drawings, printed graphic works, and sculptures by the artist and has presented a series of exhibitions on specific aspects and periods of his oeuvre. A comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Beckmann was shown as early as 1947. Subsequent shows included, among others, exhibitions focusing on his triptychs (1981), his early paintings (1983), his Frankfurt years (1984), a retrospective (1990/91), as well as presentations of his printed graphic work (2001 and 2006). The exhibition highlighting the artist’s American years thus concludes the sequence of shows exploring the individual stages of Beckmann’s career.

The exhibition is realized on the initiative of the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain as part of the project “The Phenomenon of Expressionism,” whose final phase it ushers in. Since August 2009, more than twenty cultural institutions in the Rhein Main region have centered their activities on this early-twentieth-century epoch characterized by a new start and a spirit of innovation in substantial monographic presentations, retrospectives, exhibitions, concerts, film and theater projects, as well as a symposium. “The Phenomenon of Expressionism” is the first cooperative project of the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain. The Städel’s elaborate exhibition venture is being carried out with the help of BNY Mellon as Corporate Sponsor. Thanks to the support provided by this internationally operating financial services company, numerous rarely seen works by Beckmann are being brought together in Frankfurt for the show.


Crucial loans such as the triptychs "Departure" from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "The Beginning" from the Metropolitan Museum New York and "The Argonauts" from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. have been secured for the show. "The Descent from the Cross" (1917) will also return to the city on the Main for the exhibition. This was the first of Beckmann’s paintings to enter the collection of the Städtische Galerie at the Städel, having been purchased by former Städel director Georg Swarzenski directly from the artist’s studio in 1919. It was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 and presented in the exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Today, it is part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Max Beckmann lived and taught in the United States from the late summer of 1947 on. It was only after his ten-year exile in Amsterdam that the artist was able to realize his long-cherished plan to emigrate to the United States in 1947. He spent the last and extremely productive years of his life far from Europe. The new continent held numerous encounters with other people, journeys, and impressions in store for the painter. St. Louis, Missouri became his first home in America; he stayed for two years and held a guest professorship at the city’s Washington University. In the fall of 1949, he moved to New York, where he taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Frequent shorter and longer journeys took him to the Midwest, to Chicago, to New Orleans, to Boulder, Colorado, but also to California and the West Coast, for example. The spatial expanses of the foreign continent – its coasts and the atmosphere of its “wild” landscapes, as well as the cosmos of its metropolises – were a new physical experience for Beckmann which became a perceivable source of inspiration for his art. In the midst of his new life, Max Beckmann suffered a heart attack and died on a street corner near New York City’s Central Park.


The Städel Musuem was founded in 1815 by the Frankfurt banker and merchant Johann Friedrich Städel. In 1878, a new building, designed according to the Gründerzeit style, was erected on Schaumainkai street, presently the major museum district. By the start of the 20th century, the gallery was among the most prominent German collections of classic Pan-European art; the other such collections open to the public were the Dresden Gallery, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and the Altes Museum in Berlin. In 1937, 77 paintings and 700 prints were confiscated from the museum when the National Socialists declared them "degenerate art". In 1939, the collection was moved out of Frankfurt to protect it from damage in World War II. The gallery was substantially damaged by air raids in World War II and it was rebuilt by 1966 following a design by the Frankfurt architect Johannes Krahn. An expansion building for the display of 20th-century work and special exhibits was erected in 1990, designed by Gustav Peichl. Small structural changes and renovations took place from 1997 to 1999. Overall, the collection currently comprises some 2,700 paintings, 600 sculptures and more than 100,000 drawings and prints. The rich collection presents an overview of more than 700 years of European art - from the early 14th Century through the Renaissance, Baroque and classical modernism to the present. Highlights of the extensive collection consists of works by Holbein, Cranach the Elder. Albrecht Dürer, Botticelli, Rembrandt and Vermeer, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Paul Klee as well as by Francis Bacon, Small, Serra Judge and Kippenberger. Visit the museum's website at ... www.staedelmuseum.de

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~