Max Beckmann in New York

If you hurry you can still catch the Max Beckmann exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. This small gem of a museum is located just across from Central Park, a stone's throw away from the sidewalk where Beckmann keeled over and died in 1950. The museum is famous for its collection of Austrian painters - especially Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, - but for now some of the greatest Germans from the Weimar era have taken over the third floor.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is Beckmann's Self-Portrait with Horn, which he painted in exile in 1938.

Of all the self-portraits Beckmann painted, this is his most enigmatic - and his most melancholy.  Like the other painters represented in the exhibit - Otto Dix, Kirchner, Christian Schad, and Georg Grosz,  - Beckmann's artistic sensibility was shaped by the horrors of the Great War. In Self-Portrait with Horn Beckmann is no longer the self-confident, aloof artist in the tuxedo. He is in a strange dressing gown that has a timeless, harlequin-like quality. The hunting horn, as well, appears as if from the distant past. The artist is staring off to the side expectantly, waiting for an echo of the horn call he has just sounded.  Has he sounded the alarm of the war to come?  But the artist seems enveloped in silence; the warning will not be heeded. The artist's huge hand is suspended at the center of the frame, its creative work is powerless to penetrate the silence or stave off the horrors to come.

Beckmann towers above his peers in the exhibit.  The artists have been categorized as belonging to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of Weimar painting, but Beckmann was never really a member of any school.

The Beckmann exhibit only runs until September 1, but Self-Portrait with Horn is part of the Neue Galerie's permanent collection (the museum acquired the painting in 2001 for $22.5 million), so presumably we will be able to view it in the future.

As a bonus for visitors to the museum, there is a room of wonderful photographs of Beckmann, Dix, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Lyonel Feininger all at work in their studios.

Comments

[Hattie]

I visited the Neue Gallerie last time I was in NYC. It appears that they have added a lot of work since then.
I thought that some of the offerings, as I wrote elsewhere, were examples of "outre and sometimes lascivious rich people's taste."
But that was before Lauder acquired the middlebrow Klimt portrait, which I saw in Vienna. I confess it's one of my favorite paintings for the very sentimental reason that Adele Bloch- Bauer, the model for this portrait, looks so much like my younger daughter. The story of Lauder's acquisition of this painting, which I read a while ago in the New Yorker, is quite the saga.
I believe I saw a Beckman self portrait when I was there, but I can't remember if that's the one. He seems so typical yet so distinctive. That's quite a paradox.

[qools]

this is the best source http://file.sh/new+york+torrent.html for finding rapidshare files