Max Beckmann im Dialog

… with Cecily Brown, Ella Kruglyanskaya and Dana Schutz. The three artists live in the USA or were born there. Since the beginning of their careers they have admired the work of Max Beckmann. Outside Germany he was seen as “the most German of all artists.” His painting “Walküre” (left) was one of the first he painted after his arrival in the United States in 1947. The impetus for the exhibition and the publication came from Cecily Brown; in them numerous works by Beckmann from private and museum collections enter into dialogue with recent works by the three painters of the grandchildren’s generation. It is above all his “Briefe an eine Malerin” – an address given to students of Stephens College in Columbia shortly after his arrival in the USA – that receives metaphorical answers. In Cecily Brown’s paintings, made especially for the occasion, the influence is primarily atmospheric in nature: Max Beckmann’s contouring and his hues are unmistakable in them. Ella Kruglyanskaya shows portraits of women whose vitality almost bursts the canvas and who quite obviously caricature the master’s bar and coffee-house staff. Dana Schutz brings together Beckmann’s recurring motifs in large-format works, stacking up impressions in this way and thus coming very close to his world. All three artists thereby create autonomous works that testify to the timelessness of “the most German of all artists.”

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 8/6 – 13/7/2019