Between form and subject: Max Beckmann's critical reception and development, ca. 1906--1924.

摘要

The familiar characterization of Max Beckmann (1884-1950) as a painter of modern allegories is one of modernism's most enduring myths, albeit not an entirely unfounded one. It is the aim of this dissertation to qualify and contextualize this myth by examining Beckmann's early development as a painter through the lens of his critical reception from 1906 to 1924. The dialectical relationship between form and subject, one that conditions the nature of allegory and its conceptual opposite, the symbol, was central to contemporary reviews of Beckmann's pictures. Also relevant is how critics measured his art against the artistic conventions of the Berlin Secession as well as the formal innovations of the German avant-garde. Chapter I provides a background to the critical discourse in early twentieth-century Berlin by examining the hegemony of symbolic form in the aesthetic beliefs of Arthur Schopenhauer, Julius Meier-Graefe, and Max Liebermann. Beckmann's early career as a young and controversial member of the Berlin Secession is the focus of Chapter II, which analyzes salient passages from numerous exhibition reviews with respect to the artist's penchant for the moribund genre of history painting. Chapter III explores the caesura that was WWI and its impact on Beckmann's art by way of his large-scale and unfinished painting of the Resurrection, which he began in Frankfurt in 1916. It was in this ill-fated grand machine that Beckmann effected a significant stylistic transformation in tandem with a pictorial language and semiotic strategy that would mark much of his mature work. Chapter IV demonstrates his attempt to codify these developments through a concentrated treatment of biblical subjects between 1916 and 1918. In their reviews of Night (1918-19), a grisly depiction of domestic violence and arguably Beckmann's first masterpiece, his critics applauded his successful subordination of subject to form. But was this putative success absolute? Chapter V considers this assessment by scrutinizing the reviews in relation to the demise of expressionism as a critical construct and to Wilhelm Fraenger's groundbreaking analysis of Beckmann's painting of The Dream (1921), a hermetic image that shuttles anxiously between form and subject, symbol and allegory.