Choose two works,
One early and one later,
By any one of the following artists:
Max Beckmann.
Investigate possible influences
Which have played a part
In the development
Of their ideas and imagery
Over a period of time.
Keep in mind
The times they lived in
And the social and industrial
Changes they experienced
Which in turn brought about
Change to their art.
Max Beckmann.
Remember that at the end
He was an old man,
And at the start he was young.
Choose two works;
Choose too wisely.
Take the year 1909;
Take the painting Double Portrait.
Then Take his Adam and Eve,
Done in 1917.
Barely young, Max,
Hardly old.
Eight years difference,
If my maths is any good.
Now calculate the art;
Calculate.
Adam and Eve minus Double Portrait
Equals?
Stripped naked,
Not a skerrick of material.
Back to the jungle.
Some sort of paradise,
No paradise like domestic such.
From the later first,
First the later.
A beard on Adam.
White as a sheet,
A young black line:
Is this Beckmann’s own fall?
The fall into darkness.
Anyway, nevermind, onwards.
Besides, apparently inwards.
In the first a casual pose,
His more than hers.
She is concerned;
Her sex is her concern,
Her sex is his concern.
From virginal modesty-constraint
To this frumpy slut,
As tall as her sitting
She is standing.
Well worn hip joint!
What of him -
Early on a scratch -
A touch of the reproductive palette!
Later: Hello Ladies!
The change in subject.
A thriving populace then
A dispirited continent.
What was one becomes
Two, separated by nature;
One: joined by the cloth.
After all wartrauma is.
May have been the same
Without the war,
Who’s to say?
It was what it was.
Magnificent example of a human being.
Double Portrait something of the French -
Adam and Eve something of the German.
The clash of nations:
French killing German,
German killing French.
He became what he was:
German.
A Gauguin daffodil sprung up:
The Frenchman who shunned France.
Gauguin colour would grow to be fruitful
For Beckmann.
Cezanne like is Eve;
Gauguin like Yellow Christ is Adam;
The yellow is in the flower,
That could be the Flower of Evil.
It’s a picture from Medieval:
Adam and Eve unmistakably Germanic.
He in the shadow of the Tree,
Hiding under knowledge;
She in the crisp sun light
Offering an applebreast -
Could be after the fact, is that
A bun in the oven?
Adam the surrogate;
The paternity is with the snake.
Ungrateful Rib!
Earlier she was devoted,
Attentive,
Modest,
Chaste,
And he was relaxed and comfortable;
Things were going well;
More hair than forehead,
Confident and assured.
Where did this angst come from?
Set in Cezanne environs,
More than a hint of Delacroix,
More than a nudge of Munch.
Mincing around with subtlety;
A touch here,
A touch there.
Faith in nature:
The horror of Nature;
Not flowers,
Humanity.
Under the social fabric
Skin hangs on ribs.
In the background,
There in the Double Portrait,
Over her shoulder,
Is that some dark face?
The profile of the Devil?
And a black cloud
Over his head.
The forecast of works to come;
Later may have been what it was
Regardless of anything
He wanted to avoid.
She is already dark there,
Sheathed in black;
He more a woody brown,
Clothed in the tree:
Wearing his knowledge;
She wearing her ignorance,
Bathed in the window light.
Between the two
The Titanic sinks.
The news of the days,
The Great War;
Beckmann will vouch for the greatness.
Tagged such by whom?
For Beckmann the leap
Made from gifted apprentice
To mature master
Was made through
The Great War.
That Great war:
Great.
The German turns the mirror to his people,
Those who others bunch him with;
Staunch human that he is in fact.
In Beckmann’s Double Portrait
Our dark urges
Are outside of us,
In his Adam and Eve
Those dark urges
Are the reason why we are
As we are.
Between his birth and the Double Portrait,
Influences?
A million and one!
None could be more than own experiences.
Why would the German paint like a Frenchman?,
In this case,
This double Portrait;
Elsewhere of this date:
Touches of a European Union,
The war on art waged by the Cubists;
Beckmann turned back the clock.
Nothing Supreme here in this Adam and Eve;
Where be your triangles on a flat ground?
Communist?
Internationalist?
The Bolsheviks are coming!
Something this way does come.
Maybe that Eve has a touch of the Rosa Luxenbourgs.
Where is Lenin, at the Finland Station?
Certainly the artist matures,
Turmoil: 1909 and 1917,
Turmoil: 2006.
Double Portrait is a statement:
I’m looking,
Not turning away.
The way events have been turned into lasting imagery:
Perspicacious!
The study of Art,
His study of Art
From all epochs
Led him to do so.
His was a dialogue with the past;
Now that he is past
The dialogue is still fresh.
Can a specific artist be pinned
As Abbott to his Costello?
If Newtons third law of motion:
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction
Be applied to Art:
As for each and every artwork
There is an equal and opposite artwork,
Then make a leap -
Intuitive:
Call Beckmann an opposite reaction to
Peter Pauwel Rubens action.
If you admit that,
Admit that;
Then the question begs:
Could he have been compelled to change?
And if so,
Would this not have caught him faster
In the almighty net?,
Of what we are capable of
And not so.
The more we struggle the deeper we sink;
Then the depths are what Art is all about,
Struggle,
Then the surface is what all Art is about;
All we have of a painting is a surface.
So the search for Two Rubens’
That are opposite to
Our two:
One Early and one Later.
Take a year around 1600,
Early in Rubens career
And the work: Adam and Eve;
Go forward eight or so years
To The Self Portrait with Isabella Brant;
The Double Portrait.
He was able to assemble
The tools to match Rubens;
To be the equal of
And the opposite of.
The subject remains intact
For Max,
The treatment is the opposition.
Whatever Rubens did
Max was compelled to do the opposite -
As Virgil to Dante, similarly
Rubens to Beckmann:
Rubens’: fertile
Beckmann’s: barren
Rubens’: elegant
Beckmann’s: angular
Rubens’: beautiful
Beckmann’s: ugly
Rubens’: classic
Beckmann’s: christian
Rubens’: pastoral
Beckmann’s: theatrical
Rubens’: cultured
Beckmann’s: humble
Rubens’: ornate
Beckmann’s: simple
Rubens’: bright
Beckmann’s: sombre
Rubens’: calm
Beckmann’s: anxious
The greatest influence
Is that significant other
That an artist has in art;
An action and a reaction.
The most influential factor
Is that significant other.
Viewed objectively,
As the study of a species,
Art is an activity,
A natural activity.
It is subject to the same laws
As the rest of nature.
Manmade is natural.
It is natural for humans to make.
Plutarch(a suspicious man in a trenchcoat with the hems of a pair of trousers cut off and attached to the hem) gives the perfect demonstration of unfurling a monument in his Life of Penisease(a charming account of hiding in the bushes). Most monuments in the time of Pericles(a man with an iron fist and a groin of leather) were done by the erstwhile and compliant and the most doe-eyed of all monument(permanent erection) creators was Phidias(Fiddles to his family), a man on the run from the authorities for fare evasion, littering and urinating on a gravestone. “Salty Trousers” lived a mostly quiet life shunning the limelight of Italian high society, instead preferring to live out on the street in a rudimentary cardboard shack just outside the grotto district, an area known for it’s colourful community of trouser wearing, pasta eating metrosexuals(a woman dressed like a woman, smelling like a woman and twice as sweet as both). It was here that Cimabue, he of the Salty Pantaloons, acquired his love affair with scents, of which he had more money than.
Homer: legendary legend or manly man? Either way, and it is either way, it was his plumbing that sets his stuff over others of similar standing. Digging ditches in the day and composing poems for greeting cards by day, this “individual” is, generally, thought to have been an irresponsible philanderer subject to bouts of dirt-road rage. However, who are we to judge? Leave a comment and we’ll soon find out, or get your own.
Frankie “The Nose” Petrarcaboobtube(that’s Petrarch to you), not to be confused with Plutarch(a scurrolous rumour-monger and fish eater), was a chicken boning factory worker of the humble nation of Italy(the home of the greasy wop) and early human(pre dating neanderthal). The Nose and Dante* shared a night of forbidden insight, a claim his executors strongly deny(with the hand gestures), because they gave birth to a rebirth.
*Dante was a man like any other, close associate of Virgil(close associate of *), and wobbly kneed lollipop lady.
From the projections, it is estimated that The Nasty Pasty and the anti-Nasty Pasty(The Flying Mattress) were probably born in a year and a country. Scholars dispute both the year and the country, although now most accept it, while some play chopsticks on the piano designed for toddlers. Soon a cathedral recognized a runaway train ploughing through its doors, and settling near the parapet where the Flying Mattress and The Short Lip and the Long Nose both met, and shook hands and agreed and went about the daily and nightly task of ignoring the injustice of life and the tragedy of living only to die. Authorities undertook interrogations and made some of the finest compositions in lawns with perfect edges and gutters without leaves and paint perfectly applied to perfectly sanded walls with immaculate bristles from spotless brushes. Others claim that the births took place independently, but when The Happy Fatalist began signing his name in ink with a pen, on paper and as The Flying Mattress and vice versa the Cathedral gave a thorough training in music.
The body of work produced by Rembrandt is equal to those of Wagner and Balzac and opposite to the body of work produced by Cezanne whose work is equal to those of Schoenburg and Joyce.
The body of work produced by Leonardo is equal to those of Mozart and Shakespeare and opposite to the body of work produced by Picasso whose work is equal to that of Glass.
The body of work produced by Durer is equal to that of Johnson and opposite to the body of work produced by Van Gogh whose work is equal to that of Beckett.
The body of work produced by Rubens is equal to that of Milton and opposite to the body of work produced by Beckmann whose work is equal to that of Eno.
The body of work produced by El Greco is equal to that of Cervantes and opposite to the body of work produced by Dali.
The body of work produced by Veronese is opposite to the body of work produced by Ingres whose work is equal to that of Eliot.
The body of work produced by Giotto is equal to those of J.S. Bach and Chaucer and opposite to the body of work produced by Gauguin whose work is equal to those of Stravinsky and Baudelaire.
The body of work produced by Phidias is equal to those of DuFay and Homer and opposite to the body of work produced by Cimabue whose work is equal to those of Buxtehude and Petrarch.
The body of work produced by Poussin is opposite to the body of work produced by Lautrec.
The body of work produced by Monet is equal to that of Zola and opposite to the body of work produced by Rousseau whose work is equal to that of Hibberd.
Norm
Mal
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