Max Beckmann in Amsterdam: In the Footsteps of Rembrandt and Van Gogh
A study of Beckmann's decade in Amsterdam from 1937 to 1947
Max Beckmann in Amsterdam: In the Footsteps of Rembrandt and Van Gogh
Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig, Saxony on 12 February 1884. Loosely associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany in the 1920s, Beckmann’s oeuvre is from early on specific to his own imaginative universe that is strongly marked, like that of his contemporary Otto Dix (1891-1969), by his active service in the First World War. In December 1903, Beckmann visited Amsterdam with Minna Beckmann-Tube, his first wife. At the Rijksmuseum, he recorded his impression of works by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerard Terborch and Jan van der Meer van Delft. “About Rembrandt. Very beautiful sometimes, I find the Night Watch boring, I think none of them could match his family portrait in Braunschweig. Frans Hals is the best, and then Terborch and Vermeer van Delft” (Beckmann, Self-Portrait 58).
On 19 July 1937, Beckmann moved with his second wife Mathilde Kaulbach, or Quappi, to Amsterdam to escape the Nazis. On the same day the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich where ten of Beckmann’s works were included, including at the entrance the oil paintings Kreuzabnahme (1917) and Christus und die Sünderin (1917) (Reimertz 98).
Beckmann never planned to stay in Amsterdam permanently, having originally settled on Paris or the United States[1] as his preferred destination. However, after Amsterdam fell to the German armed forces on 15 May 1940, and Paris fell on 14 June 1940, Beckmann had no viable alternative but to remain in Amsterdam. Beckmann’s letters and diary entries during the five-year period of the German occupation, which was only finally ended on 6 May 1945, were necessarily circumspect and avoided any direct reference to his opinions about the war. He had had to destroy his diaries for the period 1925-1940 for fear of them being seized by the Nazi authorities (Reimertz 103; Spieler 130-31) and was mindful that at any moment his Amsterdam apartment could be searched with potentially lethal consequences for himself and his family. There is, however, a brief diary entry on the 21 July 1942 where Beckmann refers to the Jewish transports at midnight, which had started in July 1942.
In January 1942 forced-labour camps for Jews were set up. Meanwhile the Dutch Jews began to be concentrated in Amsterdam. On 29 April 1942 the identifying Jewish star was introduced. Jews were further restricted in their occupational activities. Curfew was introduced. In July 1942, deportations began, continuing until September 1943. … Some 110,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, Sobibór and, in smaller numbers, to other camps. About 5000 survived the death camps. 75% of Dutch Jewry perished. (Davidowicz 440).
After a brief stay at the Pension Bank, Beethovenstraat, Beckmann and Quappi moved in late September or early October 1937 into an apartment and studio at Rokin 85.
The apartment – two rooms divided by a sliding door – was small in comparison to Beckmann’s previous lodgings, although by Amsterdam standards it was very much acceptable. The studio also offered a large studio with light from the north, a rarity in the area. Number 85 was a small canal house, although the canal in front of it – a branch of the river Amstel really – was largely filled in during the nineteen-thirties. During those years, the Rokin was a street at the center of the Amsterdam tobacco trade. Rokin 85, too, had long been held by a tobacco company, with offices and a storeroom in the attic, now turned studio. … The Jewish quarter was close by, including the Jodenbreestraat with Rembrandt’s house, which Beckmann visited often before the war, as well as the streets around the Waterlooplein. Deportation of the Amsterdam Jews took place from there. (Bormann 110)
The closeness of the flat in Rokin Street to Rembrandt’s house was a comfort to Beckmann.
In her [Quappi] memoirs she wrote: “During the hard and terrible period in Amsterdam it was a comfort to Max to live in the same city where Rembrandt had lived—Rembrandt, whom Max considered the greatest of all painters ... from time to time he liked to wander along the canals and over the old small arched bridges to visit Rembrandt’s house, which was not far from our apartment. Often he visited the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum, to see the paintings he loved.” (Lenz 89)
In his diaries, Beckmann recorded visits to the Moritzhaus in the Hague, which to this day has one of the finest collections of Dutch Golden Age paintings, including several masterpieces of Rembrandt, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and his Self-Portrait of 1669. In his diary entry on 18 February 1945, Beckmann recorded he had read “lots of Van Gogh” (Beckmann, Tagebücher 111) and, on 20 September 1945 that he had viewed works of Van Gogh at the Stedelijk museum, as well as his own works Zigeunerin and Sekt-Stilleben (135). Lenz argues that both Rembrandt and Van Gogh influenced Beckmann’s early works.
Beckmann was aware of and familiar with Van Gogh early on as well, as early as 1903, Quappi later reported: “Beckmann had a particular and profound admiration for Van Gogh’s life’s work: Van Gogh was a painter to whom he felt close and for whom he had a special affection. From the time I knew my husband, he read again and again Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother; he also referred to them frequently.” His close relationship with the artists mentioned even led to Max Beckmann in his early years adopting powerful impulses from them in his work. The influence of van Gogh is clear from 1905 to 1912 and again from 1915 to 1917. Influences from Rembrandt and Frans Hals are evident in the works roughly between 1908 and 1916. (90)
Lenz considers the influence of the Old Masters on Beckmann thereafter waned, but on occasions resurfaced.
Examples of these isolated works include his self-portrait of 1944, whose pose goes back to Frans Hals’s Man with Slouch Hat in Kassel, and the self-portrait in the drawing Faust on the Balcony: The Shine and Glance of Stars is Veiled, in which Beckmann, as Thomas Döring discovered, closely followed the head of “Faust” in Rembrandt’s etchings (figs. 46 and 47). Thus, he merges not only with Goethe’s Faust, but with Rembrandt’s, doubtless an homage to his “forefather” in Amsterdam. (90)
Despite the deprivations of the war, Beckmann was remarkably productive during his ten years of exile in Amsterdam. Unlike his contemporaries Christian Schad (1894-1982) and Otto Dix (1891-1962), who remained in internal exile during the war and whose work never recovered their strength and originality, Beckmann’s work retained its vitality.
Despite all the difficulties mentioned, he produced in Amsterdam a rich oeuvre in every respect, not just in terms of numbers but also of rank, like the triptychs, the illustrations for the Apocalypse and Faust, and a number of other paintings. Like an old master, and like only very few artists of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann tried to depict the wealth of life, to perceive its extraordinary variety, to make it his own in thoughts and emotions, and to create it anew. (Lenz 94)
In Amsterdam, Beckmann produced the triptychs Akrobats (1939), Perseus (1940/41), Actors (1941/2), Carnaval (1942/3), and Blind Man’s Bluff (1944-1945), as well as a large number of self-portraits, paintings, prints, watercolours and works on paper.
In 1941, Beckmann produced a series of 27 black-and-white lithographs, some hand coloured, to illustrate the Apocalypse (The Book of Revelation), published in a limited edition of twenty-four copies by Georg Hartmann. From 1943 to 1944, he made 143 pen and ink drawings to illustrate an edition of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, again commissioned by Georg Hartmann. However, during this period he only succeeded in one sale to a public institution in the Netherlands, the double portrait Max Beckmann and Quappi (1941), to the Stedilijk museum in 1945.
As the Dutch journalist J. M. Prange wrote in May 1947, “It may seem incomprehensible to all of us that Amsterdam, that center of the arts, has accommodated Max Beckmann since 1937, one of the greatest German artists of our Western civilisation, and he has passed through our artistic life largely unnoticed” (Bormann 120).
Beckmann’s diary entries from May 1940 to 8 May 1945, when Germany officially surrendered, provide a topographical record of Beckmann’s stay in war-time Amsterdam: the banality of his everyday life in a city subjugated by the German occupation and penury; progress with his paintings; passing references to events experienced directly or at second hand; trips to the surrounding countryside. Beckmann’s letters from the Amsterdam period, however, provide scant information on his movements in the City and its surroundings, simply recounting details of his work, his business dealings, and his social and familial concerns. Beckmann worked intensively at his art despite the constant overflight of bombers. He went on excursions outside of Amsterdam with Quappi, friends and family, to Eykenstein, Wildenberg, Zandvoort, the Hague, Harlem, Doorn, Huizen, Laren and Overveen. On 29 May 1943, Beckmann related his afternoon walk through “deserted Jewish streets and houses” (Tagebücher 64).[2] On 17 September 1943 he had a fall from a tandem bike on his way to Wildenberg resulting in long-lasting damage: “In the afternoon while walking and in the evening severe pain in my legs and back” (70). At Overveen, despite access to the beaches being prohibited, he ran amongst the sand-dunes: “Plenty of fresh air and wind and able to relax in peace alone” (2 November 1943, 73). On 7 December 1943 he visited Rotterdam for the first time since the catastrophic German bombing attack of 14 May 1940: “I thought a lot of my last days in Rotterdam - I can’t remember how many years ago, and now? Does Berlin also look like this?” (76). On 26 December 1943, he visited the circus, where “there was an excellent trampoline group” (77). On 29 December 1943, he visited the local cabaret, described as “pretty rotten” (77), local bars such as the Kaperschip on Rokin Street or the nearby Don Juan Bar at Muntplein 10. He went for walks, often alone or accompanied by Quappi and their dog Butshy, along the Amstel canal, to the Vondelpark, or Frederiksplein: “Later I followed on foot the ice-cold Amstel «On the trail of Rembrandt». Ha — o — I the miserable one — Afterwards through the deserted night streets in the rain back home to Q. and Butshy” (23 January 1944, 80). “Walking in the cold air at the harbour, pretty dire and depressed, the whole day and night planes in the sky – one doesn’t know any more if they are German or English (20 February 1944, 82). On 24 February 1944, he mentions the disastrous accidental bombing of Nijmegen by the allies on 22 February 1944. On 4 March 1944 he visited for the first time the Madrid-bar. Beckmann’s diary entry for VE Day on 8 May 1945, shows his ability to distance himself from contemporary events. “In the morning I went for a walk alone over the train station. The English are now arriving in huge numbers of tanks and trucks on which the locals are celebrating everywhere– I almost worked the whole day long … Indeed, everything is turning out as I predicted” (120). His entry for the following day is also phlegmatic. “Long bicycle outing. I saw police in green uniforms– prisoners being carried away in trucks and large English tanks approaching from the opposite direction. – Afternoon spent with old graphics and drawings. Content”(120).
Beckmann and Quappi remained in Amsterdam until they left by ship for America from Rotterdam on 29 August 1947. Apart from a brief visit to Amsterdam in June 1948, Beckmann remained in America until his death from a heart attack in New York on 27 December 1950. It is a testament to Beckmann’s dedication and perseverance that despite the horrendous environment and increasing wartime penury, he managed during his stay in Amsterdam to produce some of his finest work. His artistic endeavour was undoubtedly partly his means of escaping from this intolerable situation but also reflected the drive to create which marked Beckmann out as the most significant German painter of the twentieth century.
Works Cited
Beckmann, Max. Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950. Edited by Barbara Copeland Buenger, U of Chicago Press, 1997.
---. Tagebücher 1940-1950. Compiled by Mathilde Q. Beckmann, edited by Erhard Göpel, Langen Müller, 1977.
---. Max Beckmann Briefe: 1937-1950. Vol. III, edited by Klaus Gallwitz and Ursula Harter, Piper, 1996.
Bormann, Beatrice von. “A Decade in ‘Ironing Board Land’: Max Beckmann in Dutch Exile.” Max Beckmann: Exile in Amsterdam. Edited by the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Hatje Cantz, 2007, pp. 107-33.
Davidowicz, Lucy S. The War against the Jews 1933-1945. Penguin Books, 1990.
Lenz, Christian. ‘“Beautiful and Horribly Life-like”: The Art of Max Beckmann, 1937-47.” Max Beckmann: Exile in Amsterdam. Edited by the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Hatje Cantz, 2007, pp. 33-106.
Peters, Olaf. “Max Beckmann, Die Neue Sachlichkeit und der Wertrelativismus in der Weimarer Republik.” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, vol. 61, 2000, pp. 237-61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/i24657461.
Reimertz, Stephan. Max Beckmann. Rowohlt, 1995.
Spieler, Reinhard. Beckmann 1884-1950: Der Weg zum Mythos. Taschen, 2011.
[1] See Beckmann’s letter to Sigmund Morgenroth of 30 November 1939 (Briefe 67-69)
[2] All English translation from Beckmann’s Tagebücher are my own.