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Lot Essay
Painted in the spring of 1949, Stilleben mit grünem Buch und Rettichen is a late work that Beckmann painted in St. Louis, Missouri shortly before his last move to New York where he had been offered a teaching post at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Bought directly from the artist in May 1949 by Beckmann's chief patron in the United States, Morton D. May, and later donated to the St. Louis Museum of Art, the painting is a typically strong and forceful depiction of earthy reality and the power of the object.
Painted at a time when, in America, Beckmann was increasingly surrounded by the widespread championing of abstract art, Stilleben mit grünem Buch und Rettichen is a work that asserts more powerfully than ever Beckmann's long-standing belief in what he described as the "mystery" of objective reality. As he had stated in 1938, 'what I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible. To penetrate is to go through" ('On My Painting' 1938, reproduced in B.C. Buenger, Max Beckmann: Self Portrait in Words, 1997, p. 302).
Abstraction for Beckmann was a fanciful illusion and he consistently maintained that any pursuit of the mystery of life had to begin with the object. As he told the very first American students he lectured to at the Univerity of Washington, 'If you want to reproduce an object, two elements are required: first the identification with the object must be perfect and secondly, it should contain, in addition, something quite different. This second element is difficult to explain. Almost as difficult as to discover one's self. In fact it's just this element of our own self that we are all in search of' (Max Beckmann: Speech given to his first class in the United States at Washington University, cited in P. Selz, Max Beckmann, New York, 1996, p. 83).
For Beckmann in dealing with simple objects his aim was 'always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting --to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence' (cited in Ibid., p. 101). With its distinctive strong black lines and fiercely assertive painterliness, Stilleben mit grünem Buch und Rettichen stands as a pictorial manifesto of these beliefs using the simplest of everday objects, fish, a book, a table, radishes, to generate an undeniable sense of physical presence within hte illusionistic and essentially abstract medium of paint.
Painted at a time when, in America, Beckmann was increasingly surrounded by the widespread championing of abstract art, Stilleben mit grünem Buch und Rettichen is a work that asserts more powerfully than ever Beckmann's long-standing belief in what he described as the "mystery" of objective reality. As he had stated in 1938, 'what I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible. To penetrate is to go through" ('On My Painting' 1938, reproduced in B.C. Buenger, Max Beckmann: Self Portrait in Words, 1997, p. 302).
Abstraction for Beckmann was a fanciful illusion and he consistently maintained that any pursuit of the mystery of life had to begin with the object. As he told the very first American students he lectured to at the Univerity of Washington, 'If you want to reproduce an object, two elements are required: first the identification with the object must be perfect and secondly, it should contain, in addition, something quite different. This second element is difficult to explain. Almost as difficult as to discover one's self. In fact it's just this element of our own self that we are all in search of' (Max Beckmann: Speech given to his first class in the United States at Washington University, cited in P. Selz, Max Beckmann, New York, 1996, p. 83).
For Beckmann in dealing with simple objects his aim was 'always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting --to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence' (cited in Ibid., p. 101). With its distinctive strong black lines and fiercely assertive painterliness, Stilleben mit grünem Buch und Rettichen stands as a pictorial manifesto of these beliefs using the simplest of everday objects, fish, a book, a table, radishes, to generate an undeniable sense of physical presence within hte illusionistic and essentially abstract medium of paint.