New Objectivity - 902

Narrator (m):

Gustav F. Hartlaub considered Max Beckmann to be the greatest living painter and organized his first solo museum exhibition in 1928. Beckmann was already extremely well represented in the exhibition on New Objectivity in 1925, with fourteen paintings. Yet it was by no means undisputed whether he even belonged to New Objectivity.

Narrator (f):

The Kunsthalle Mannheim had negotiated with the artist about an acquisition as early as 1914. The first purchases, however, Christ and the Sinner und and Portrait of Mrs.Tube, did not occur until 1919, after World War I had ended. In a letter of September 23, 1918, in which Hartlaub was trying to persuade his superior Fritz Wichert to purchase Beckmann paintings, he compared him to eminent artists:

Narrator (m):

“Let me tell you that I received the purest and strongest impression from Beckmann’s latest great works than I have had from any new art in years. Here is expression of the utmost power and yet the full roundness of a living nature. Spiritualization like never before, and yet nature as solid and strong and spirited as in the work of Signorelli, Dürer, Michelangelo.”

Narrator (f):

Christ and the Sinner is rendered in a pale, reduced palette and still features the expressively heightened formal language typical of Beckmann’s early work. Jesus—with Beckmann’s facial features—is preventing a raging mob from stoning a woman who kneels before him. His hands—accusing, indicting, ready for violence, defending, protecting, and accepting—illustrate in gestures the dramatic scene from the Gospel of John. The famous words “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” resolve the conflict nonviolently. The aspect of powerlessness also expresses the artist’s wartime experience. He had initially volunteered as a medical orderly, but his ordeals traumatized him so badly that he was discharged from the service after a breakdown in 1915. This work was painted in 1917, still during the war, as one of the first after his discharge.

Narrator (m):

In 1933, Beckmann’s teaching position at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main was eliminated; four years later, numerous works were confiscated from German museums as “degenerate.” That same year, 1937, the artist and his wife left Germany to seek refuge in Amsterdam from persecution by the National Socialists. The painting Christ and the Sinner was presumably sold to a gallery in New York already in 1938 and finally bequeathed to the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1955.