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拍品专文
In the autumn of 1947, Max Beckmann and his wife Quappi arrived in Saint Louis, Missouri, drawn to the heart of the American Midwest by the offer of a teaching position at Washington University’s School of Fine Arts. Beckmann had been invited by Kenneth Hudson, Dean of the School, to take a temporary position as instructor in Drawing and Painting, replacing the American artist Philip Guston, who had recently left for Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. ‘Saint Louis is lovely,’ Beckmann wrote a month after their arrival. ‘A truly fabulous garden city with a hunk of downtown at the Mississippi, many skyscrapers like New York. People quite agreeable, we are being spoiled a little because they all here have very exact knowledge of my work. School not too strenuous. Very beautiful studio in which I’m working already energetically. In short, it seems that life in its later stage has again a friendlier smile for me…’ (letter to S. Lackner, October 1947; quoted in S. Lackner, ‘Shared Exile: My Friendship with Max Beckmann, 1933-1950,’ in Max Beckmann in Exile, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, 1996, p. 116).
The gentle atmosphere of Saint Louis suited Beckmann and, once settled, he threw himself into his painting again, working almost daily in his studio located at the top of the west stairway of Bixby Hall, not far from his classroom. In America, Beckmann was increasingly surrounded by the widespread championing of abstract art, yet he remained dedicated to the figurative, creating densely packed still lifes, dynamic interior scenes, and acutely observed portraits through these years. Painted during his final months in Saint Louis, Hemdfrau (auf Balkon) centres on a solitary woman dressed only in a light, white chemise, as she pauses before a pair of open doors that lead on to the adjoining balcony. Seen from behind, the figure – whose colouring suggests this may be a portrait of Quappi – appears stock-still, her attention caught by the light of the moon as it casts romantic reflections on the surface of a rippling body of water. There is a quiet intimacy to the scene – wearing just her underclothes and her hair loose, the woman appears lost in thought as she contemplates the view. As is typical of Beckmann’s paintings from these years, the composition is tightly compressed and cropped, creating a rich contrast between the enclosed space of the interior in which the woman stands, and the open freedom of the view glimpsed through the doorway.
Hemdfrau (auf Balkon) was purchased directly from the artist in 1949 by the businessman and philanthropist Morton D. May, one of Beckman’s most important and dedicated patrons during his years in America. May’s interest in art collecting began in 1941, when he built his first home and ‘began to acquire a few little things to fill it’ (quoted in L. Roth, Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings, Saint Louis, 2015, p. 18). After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, May’s collecting activities increased, acquiring works by American modernists such as Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley, as well as paintings by the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo.
According to May, it was the painter Maurice Freedman who first suggested he turn his attention to Beckmann, having previously visited a mid-career retrospective of the German artist’s paintings in Paris in 1931. ‘Beckmann was virtually unknown in this country,’ May later recalled, ‘so we had a hard time finding his work’ (quoted in ibid., p. 19). He successfully purchased his first painting by the artist – Zwei Schauspielerinnen bei der Garderobe (Göpel, no. 728) – in 1948, from Curt Valentin, sparking a passion that would have a defining impact on the rest of his life. Eager to meet Beckmann in person, May approached the artist with a proposal for a portrait commission. The artist agreed to paint the enthusiastic collector, who explained that Beckmann ‘spent two weeks getting to know me before he even made a sketch. Then there were two sittings of not more than a half hour each. Before he started to paint he had pulled out my history. He tried to paint much more than what’s on the surface of the canvas’ (quoted in ibid., p. 204). Over the course of the project, May bought several more works from the artist, including Hemdfrau (auf Balkon), and the two men remained close after the Beckmanns had left Saint Louis for New York.
After Beckmann’s death, May continued to eagerly pursue the artist’s works and quickly became known as the foremost private collector of his work in the United States – by 1958 he owned thirty-eight paintings that spanned the full spectrum of the artist’s career. May’s intention was to establish a comprehensive group of works that offered an overview of each stage of Beckmann’s diverse oeuvre, explaining to the artist’s son Peter in 1956 that he was ‘anxious to develop the world’s finest collection of Beckmann which will eventually be given to our museum [the City Art Museum in Saint Louis]’ (quoted in ibid., p. 22). To this end, May constantly sought to improve the strength of his holdings, and was unafraid to exchange or sell a painting in order to acquire another work by the artist from a period or style he felt was missing from his expansive collection. This appears to have been the case for Hemdfrau (auf Balkon), which was extensively exhibited across America as part of May’s collection through the 1960s, before passing through the Galerie Serge Sabarsky in New York and being acquired by the family of the present owner in 1982.
The gentle atmosphere of Saint Louis suited Beckmann and, once settled, he threw himself into his painting again, working almost daily in his studio located at the top of the west stairway of Bixby Hall, not far from his classroom. In America, Beckmann was increasingly surrounded by the widespread championing of abstract art, yet he remained dedicated to the figurative, creating densely packed still lifes, dynamic interior scenes, and acutely observed portraits through these years. Painted during his final months in Saint Louis, Hemdfrau (auf Balkon) centres on a solitary woman dressed only in a light, white chemise, as she pauses before a pair of open doors that lead on to the adjoining balcony. Seen from behind, the figure – whose colouring suggests this may be a portrait of Quappi – appears stock-still, her attention caught by the light of the moon as it casts romantic reflections on the surface of a rippling body of water. There is a quiet intimacy to the scene – wearing just her underclothes and her hair loose, the woman appears lost in thought as she contemplates the view. As is typical of Beckmann’s paintings from these years, the composition is tightly compressed and cropped, creating a rich contrast between the enclosed space of the interior in which the woman stands, and the open freedom of the view glimpsed through the doorway.
Hemdfrau (auf Balkon) was purchased directly from the artist in 1949 by the businessman and philanthropist Morton D. May, one of Beckman’s most important and dedicated patrons during his years in America. May’s interest in art collecting began in 1941, when he built his first home and ‘began to acquire a few little things to fill it’ (quoted in L. Roth, Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings, Saint Louis, 2015, p. 18). After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, May’s collecting activities increased, acquiring works by American modernists such as Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley, as well as paintings by the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo.
According to May, it was the painter Maurice Freedman who first suggested he turn his attention to Beckmann, having previously visited a mid-career retrospective of the German artist’s paintings in Paris in 1931. ‘Beckmann was virtually unknown in this country,’ May later recalled, ‘so we had a hard time finding his work’ (quoted in ibid., p. 19). He successfully purchased his first painting by the artist – Zwei Schauspielerinnen bei der Garderobe (Göpel, no. 728) – in 1948, from Curt Valentin, sparking a passion that would have a defining impact on the rest of his life. Eager to meet Beckmann in person, May approached the artist with a proposal for a portrait commission. The artist agreed to paint the enthusiastic collector, who explained that Beckmann ‘spent two weeks getting to know me before he even made a sketch. Then there were two sittings of not more than a half hour each. Before he started to paint he had pulled out my history. He tried to paint much more than what’s on the surface of the canvas’ (quoted in ibid., p. 204). Over the course of the project, May bought several more works from the artist, including Hemdfrau (auf Balkon), and the two men remained close after the Beckmanns had left Saint Louis for New York.
After Beckmann’s death, May continued to eagerly pursue the artist’s works and quickly became known as the foremost private collector of his work in the United States – by 1958 he owned thirty-eight paintings that spanned the full spectrum of the artist’s career. May’s intention was to establish a comprehensive group of works that offered an overview of each stage of Beckmann’s diverse oeuvre, explaining to the artist’s son Peter in 1956 that he was ‘anxious to develop the world’s finest collection of Beckmann which will eventually be given to our museum [the City Art Museum in Saint Louis]’ (quoted in ibid., p. 22). To this end, May constantly sought to improve the strength of his holdings, and was unafraid to exchange or sell a painting in order to acquire another work by the artist from a period or style he felt was missing from his expansive collection. This appears to have been the case for Hemdfrau (auf Balkon), which was extensively exhibited across America as part of May’s collection through the 1960s, before passing through the Galerie Serge Sabarsky in New York and being acquired by the family of the present owner in 1982.