hanging by a thread

Max Beckmann studied medieval German art, the triptychs, loaded with gory, violent scenes of Christian martyrdom, at its most inglorious and vulgar incarnations of the human grotesque. In his modern condition, the contradictions of Weimar, there is none of the moral clarity, the assured conviction of the northern spirit. Here there is a stalemate, a dead heat between right and wrong, good and evil. The verdict is very much in doubt, leaving justice hanging in the balance…

( see link at end) …In Beckmann’s dynamically jumbled multifigure narratives there is often an appealing sweetness that calls to mind a sophisticated sort of children’s book illustration. His themes are anything but juvenile, however. “Galleria Umberto” from 1925 is a bewildering, nightmarish scene in which a man with amputated arms hangs upside down over a group of people engulfed by flood waters. Only the colors of a partly submerged Italian flag hint that the painting is a meditation on the rise of Fascism in Italy.Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/arts/design/08beck.html

Beckmann. Galleria Umberto. 1925. Image: wiki. ---According to Adorno's theory, the elements of the Authoritarian personality type are: Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong Respect for submission to acknowledged authority Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different A negative view of people in general - i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power A belief in simple answers and polemics - i.e. The media controls us all or The source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days. Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas. A black and white worldview. A tendency to project one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group...Read More:http://www.psychologistworld.com/influence_personality/authoritarian_personality.php

Beckmann’s work was always chocked full with personal statements charged with emotional issues. A dialectic between ideology and behavior. The artist in exile, hounded by a nagging sense of inferiority and uselessness, a displaced eternal wanderer, an individual persona non-grata punctuated by short, in the blink of an eye moments of redemption of the prodigal son. But more predominant is a disconnect, a dissonance between space and turmoil coated with a profound bitterness; a violence that is literal and emotional, tortured, but seemingly too shambling and incoherent, almost anarchic to be considered messianic. Too stark, garish and staged; but it does reveal how industry, the entertainment industry can tease out the sugar from this art, and bullshit it into mass reproduction that is kitsch, romanticized and sentimental that totally destroys the contradictions of the art, breaking it down into bottled pablum.

---"By the mid-1920s, Beckmann had become one of Germany's foremost Modern painters. His work was hailed as a leading example of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a short-lived movement distinguished by the rejection of Expressionism and the revival of realism. Often cynical in its outlook, Neue Sachlichkeit moved away from the subjectivity of Expressionist emotion and chronicled the bourgeois excesses of Weimar culture with a frighteningly detached demeanor. While Beckmann certainly engaged in social criticism in his work during this period, he did so in a broader context than other artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit, such as Dix and Grosz, continuing to confront metaphysical issues in his paintings.---Read More:http://www.todoperaweb.com.ar/biblio/Beckmann.html

Beckmann is obviously dealing with the dark underside of human nature, the split off side of fascism that is still fascinated with the human body, as if the tight formations of people in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will were now drugged and are staggering about in a debauched bacchanal of reverie. Degenerate?  The Nazis were not unperceptive about Modernist art, people like Beckmann, Grosz and Dix were abhorrent to them since they reflected a cut off and stored element of their psyche they were disavowing. If this work dis not possess the power it did, they would not have reacted that viciously to it, either burning it in a bonfire of the vanities or peddling it for foreign exchange. The anti-fascist posing and gestures, were in their own inherent way, also a “spectacle” where the light and the party mood conveys a gallows sort of joy filled with artificial light and a forced and labored party mood.

---From Piazzale Loreto in 1945, where Mussolini's corpse was displayed to an angry crowd and hanged from a lamppost, the documentary shows the morbid link between the dead dictator's body as a representation of the power and the downtrodden Italian people, who were finally able to retaliate and abuse him after 20 years of absolute power. An neo-fascist group seized Mussolini's body after Piazzale Loreto and it was discovered a year later by Milan police. Thed new film continues from this point, showing shots of Mussolini's corpse in decomposition and partly mummified. The images were hidden in a top-secret folder in the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs for over half a century. "Even in death, Mussolini remains a cumbersome figure because too many Italians adored him when he was still alive," says the voiceover. The movie is inspired by a book of the same title by the historian Sergio Luzzatto. In the book, the obsession with physical appearance, a key feature of the Fascism, was transformed after the fall of Mussolini into a fascination with his dead body. Read more: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/258869/20111130/unseen-pictures-mussolini-s-corpse-graphic-images.htm#ixzz1uMvDCA3B---

Beckmann’s scenes, the arrangements, are often jumbled with people, individuals who tend to irrationally overlap, randomly floating without goal or anchorage, almost resembling the chaotic middle ages type paintings with unpretentious,somewhat primitive explorations of violence. Almost everything is cluttered with an aura of the grotesque and vulgar, a collage feeling running to the point of chaos. The lack of narrative is the narrative. A narrative of the claustrophobic groping within Beckmann’s use of space that lacks the polished convention of tact, but ostensibly conforms to the norms of hierarchy.