Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950; “Scene from the Destruction of Messina,” 1909; oil on canvas; 100 1/4 x 105 3/8 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 837:1983

Morton D. May might have amassed one of the most impressive collections of twentieth-century German art on the planet, but throughout his life he was, first and foremost, a businessman. Born in 1914 as heir to the May Department Stores retail empire, merchandising was in his DNA.

In the late forties, May went on a quest to obtain cutting-edge modernist art to decorate his new home. He struck gold in 1951 on a visit to J.B. Neumann’s New Art Circle in New York City, where he purchased a commanding twenty-five works. His revelation wasn’t aesthetic, however—he’d been to the gallery years before, and seen the same works on sale, but bought none. What prompted his purchase was the fact that they hadn’t sold in the intervening years: a businessman through and through, May knew that he could buy unsold inventory for cheap. May owned up to his commercial tendencies, too. Commenting on why he wasn’t purchasing the era’s more fashionable School of Paris works—the Fauves, the Cubists, Mondrian, Modigliani, and the like—May said, “I don’t necessarily like the Germans better than the best of the French… but I was able to collect the Germans because I was the only one interested in them for years.” May’s private communications were no more sentimental than his public comments: Melissa Venator, the St. Louis Art Museum’s assistant curator of modern art and a specialist in twentieth-century Germany, characterized his letters to art dealers as “very transactional.”

May’s self-proclaimed “one-man crusade” in favor of German expressionism may have been commercially driven, but it was immensely successful. Just six years after his epiphany at New Art Circle, May bought Franz Marc’s “The Little Mountain Goats” for $16,000—four times the total price he’d paid for twenty-five similar works in his initial purchase. The market had caught up with his taste. After 1966, May mostly turned his attention away from Germany to another undervalued art market: ancient art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. When he passed away in 1983, nearly his entire collection of the German moderns—the most comprehensive of its kind outside of Europe—was bequeathed to the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM). Today, perspicacious viewers at the SLAM will be able to glean the history of German expressionism and its successors—and with them, the story of the volatile yet fertile country which birthed the movement.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, German (active Switzerland), 1880–1938; “Tavern,” c.1909; oil on canvas; 28 1/4 x 32 inches framed: 36 3/4 x 40 1/2 x 4 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 901:1983

Unbounded Idealism: The Prewar Years

It’s 1906, and things are looking up for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a student at the Technical University Dresden. Though Kirchner’s family doesn’t support his wish to become an artist, he’s found a coterie of students who do—and, more importantly, who share his fervid motives for painting. In a woodcut manifesto as juvenile as it is impassioned, he sets forth the group’s principles: “Anyone who conveys directly and without falsification the powers that compel him to create is one of us.” The clique desperately wishes to free themselves from the confines of antiquated academic painting, and to usher in the medium’s sensuous future. As such, the collective (which consists of Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and later Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller) dubs themselves “Die Brücke,” German for “The Bridge.” They would link art’s drab status quo with the expressionistic future they longed to provide.

In accordance with their youthful aspirations, the group’s works used swift, vivid brushstrokes. Their collective muse was the milieu with which they most engaged: metropolitan nightlife. Kirchner’s “Tavern” of 1909—created during the movement’s inchoate stages—depicts three suit-clad men sitting at a bar while diners behind them noiselessly imbibe their drinks. Kirchner’s gestural brushstrokes (the patrons’ countenances are uniformly unclear, constituted by vague hasty marks) and indiscriminate use of saturated colors give the scene an air of immediacy, as if he’s captured a whirlwind just before it dissolves into nothingness. Where previous renderers of nightlife emphasized the external appearances of its denizens—take Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who carefully rendered the raiment and facial features of his Parisian dandies—all there is to make out in Kirchner’s figures is a certain ineffable vitality. It was this palpable life force that he and other Die Brücke members were determined to introduce to the mainstream.

Also on display at the SLAM is Kirchner’s blue-robed “Portrait of Gerti.” The bright, cascading colors which constitute her face make plain the influence of Matisse and the Fauves upon Die Brücke’s members—though Matisse painted “The Joy of Life,” it was Kirchner who tapped into this exultant sensation with every mark he applied. Portraits by Erich Heckel and Emil Nolde are also on view, serving as additional exemplars for Die Brücke’s novel approach to portraiture: an artist should not merely render their subject, they believed, but do so in such a way that they betray their attitude toward the model. As such, Heckel’s pity is palpable in the rigid umber fields and the uncannily geometric face with which his “Man in Brown” is rendered; likewise, one can detect Nolde’s animal joy in the iridescent outlines and plump forms of his “Woman (in Strong Light).”

Emil Nolde, German, 1867–1956; “Woman (in Strong Light),” 1912; oil on canvas; 23 5/8 × 19 1/8 inches framed: 33 3/8 × 29 7/8 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 923:1983

Eventually, Kirchner’s immaturity got the best of his collective: in 1913, he wrote a chronicle of the movement in which he magnified his own achievements and outright denied the influence of other European expressionists on the clique’s output. After other members objected, Die Brücke formally dissolved. But the idea that art takes inspiration as much from the artist’s inner life as from the world it renders would continue to reverberate throughout German aesthetic consciousness.

Once a successful law professor, Wassily Kandinsky abandoned his lucrative career to pursue painting. In his 1910 publication “Concerning the Spiritual In Art,” his reasons became apparent: “The eye is the hammer,” he wrote. “The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.” Where others saw simple arrangements of color and form, Kandinsky heard raucous symphonies—a music which, he held, could unveil mystical truths to the soul. After many years of working in Munich, Kandinsky became the center of a club of similarly-minded artists—most prominently August Macke, Franz Marc, Gabriele Munter and Alexej von Jawlensky—who adopted the moniker “The Blue Rider,” echoing the title of one of Kandinsky’s early works.

Vasily Kandinsky, Russian (active Germany), 1866–1944; “Murnau with Locomotive,” 1911; oil on canvas; 37 3/4 × 41 1/8 inches framed: 44 3/4 × 48 1/4 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May by exchange 142:1986

There’s no part of the SLAM where the specificity of Morton May’s taste is on better display than in its collection of Blue Rider works. May “generally favored the artists of the Brücke over those of the Blue Rider,” Melissa Venator says, hence the comparatively paltry number of works by Kandinsky and his followers in the permanent collection. And despite the fact that the most critically acclaimed works of Kandinsky and von Jawlensky are their pioneering abstractions, May’s skepticism toward nonrepresentational work (he condemned it in a letter as “evidence of spiritual barrenness and the great fear of modern artists to deal with reality”) is what led to the museum’s present dearth of non-objective Blue Rider paintings.

Kandinsky held blue to be the most spiritual of colors, describing how it “beckons man into the infinite, arousing a longing for purity.” Indeed, swaths of blue are prominent in Kandinsky’s “Murnau with Locomotive” at the SLAM, where they highlight the foliage of a snow-coated tree. Further from the viewer, a train chugs leftwards against a backdrop of rectilinear mountains. It’s as if the picture’s background—constituted by wan grays and dull browns—exists solely to magnify the wondrous intensity of each azure reflection on the tree’s surface. And despite the scene’s compositional implausibility—anybody who went to Murnau would surely see the details of a single tree drowned out by a speeding train and dwarfed by the gargantuan Bavarian Alps—something about Kandinsky’s sublime rendering of these trivialities seems truer to the world’s fundamental state than if he’d rendered the scene as it appeared. Kandinsky painted with reference to his soul, not his eyes—it’s only right that contemporary viewers of his work take the same approach. (While “Murnau with Locomotive” gives us precious insight into Kandinsky’s theoretical framework, it came at a hefty price. Not included in May’s original bequest, it was acquired by future-minded museum personnel in 1986—a Kandinsky would bolster the collection for years to come, they reasoned. In fact, they believed its value to be so great that they authorized the deaccession of thirty-three paintings from May’s collection—all by lesser-known German expressionists—to fund its purchase. Today, the aftermath of this rash acquisition is left to curators like Melissa Venator, who lamented that the purchase left the collection “smaller, less diverse, and less complete than the one May donated initially.”)

Franz Marc, German, 1880–1916; “The Little Mountain Goats,” 1914; oil on canvas; 23 7/8 × 16 inches framed: 31 3/4 × 24 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 912:1983

The Blue Rider’s other members shared Kandinsky’s impassioned belief in art’s spiritual power. Franz Marc’s “The Little Mountain Goats” uses intense colors and cubist geometry—jagged forms depicted from multiple angles—to render two of the titular animals frolicking amid thorny mountains. Marc’s mature oeuvre almost entirely depicts primordially vibrant animals—each one seems to signify the fundamental generative zeal that animates all living beings. The rouged cheeks and piercing stare of “Woman’s Head with Green Eyes”—by American expat Lyonel Feininger—will hold your gaze for minutes as you try to decipher her peculiar allure. Upon further inspection, it’s clear that she isn’t depicted proportionally—her arms are about as wide as her head, and her chest melts into her bicep—but all of this is washed away the moment you set eyes upon her transfixing visage.

Lyonel Feininger, American (active Germany), 1871–1956; “Woman’s Head with Green Eyes,” 1915; oil on canvas; 28 x 24 1/2 inches framed: 34 1/4 x 30 7/8 x 2 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 887:1983

Amidst these idealistic projects, however, a storm was brewing. The same year that Marc painted his unsullied goats, a Serbian gunman in Sarajevo assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne. A succession of war declarations followed, and before long, young German men were drafted to serve in what became known as the Great War. Marc and his compatriot August Macke would see their production of idyllic naturescapes prematurely halted: both died on the frontlines in 1914. (The deaths of two leading members led to The Blue Rider’s dissolution.) Romantic ideals were shattered by the war’s banal violence. The end of the war brought little solace for German citizens, as the Treaty of Versailles placed all blame for the conflict’s bloodshed on Germany and, accordingly, forced the nation to pay gargantuan annual reparations. As a result, Weimar Germany suffered from hyperinflation and general political instability. If German art was to endure, it would have to forgo its utopian pretense for a sharper, more cynical wavelength.

Disillusionment and Grandeur: Between the Wars

What animated Die Brücke’s hedonism and The Blue Rider’s chromatic soul-searching was the fundamental belief that the act of painting centers on the artist’s desire for inner fulfillment. One look at the blown-out trees and decaying skeletons of Otto Dix’s post-battle landscape “At Langemarck (February 1918)” in the SLAM’s permanent collection is enough to shatter these pretenses—detached individualism lost steam once artists realized how fragile and expendable the human body is. Artists like Dix who survived the carnage came away with a different outlook: however hideous the real world may be, art must genuinely engage with it. When Dix and some colleagues (among them George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter and Jeanne Mammen) exhibited at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925, it was under the title “Neue Sachlichkeit,” most commonly translated as “New Objectivity.” The term stuck as a label characteristic of the heightened figures and theatrical setups each artist used to probe the odd milieu which coalesced during Germany’s economic downturn.

Dix—who served in the war—was openly disdainful of prewar idealism, a fact made plain in his triple-portrait “The Felixmüller Family.” In electric colors and cascading fragmented fields (note that “New Objectivity” does not denote visual objectivity), it depicts expressionist painter Conrad Felixmüller with his wife, Londa, and infant son, Lukas. While mother and child are rendered head-on in tender pink fields, Conrad’s neon-yellow profile stares aloofly to the side while reaching an imperious hand toward his son—Dix blatantly condemns expressionist self-indulgence by depicting Conrad as an imprudent father lost in la-la land. While previous generations were content to speak of love in terms of inner yearnings and soul-driven desires, the ranks of New Objectivity spoke a chiefly physical language. For them, where the flame of love was most intense it was also at its most visceral—hence Dix’s depiction here of a doting mother and her precious son in textured muscle-colored tones, as if their bond transcends pesky skin.

George Grosz, German, 1893–1959; “Cafe,” 1916; oil on canvas; 19 × 12 3/4 inches framed: 29 1/8 × 23 3/16 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 889:1983

Dix’s compatriot and friend George Grosz was bolder in his ridicule of German society between the wars. His “Café” (1916) depicts a nighttime eatery populated by four rotund figures—a faceless bartender, two inflamed gamblers, and one eggheaded cigar smoker. Grosz’s disdain for social inequality within the Weimar Republic and the capitalist social order which fostered it (he was a card-carrying Communist) was expressed in many paintings like this one: Germany’s leaders caricatured as corpulent, greedy businessmen partaking in trifling fun while the country’s poor struggled to make ends meet.

But it was neither Dix nor Grosz that Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, who coined the term “New Objectivity,” regarded as the movement’s most important artist. That honor went to a young painter who would be classified under the umbrellas of realism, expressionism and surrealism, but was always too slippery for strict labels. His name was Max Beckmann, and through a sequence of serendipitous happenings, a plethora of his work would end up at the SLAM.

Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950; “Sinking of the Titanic,” 1912–13; oil on canvas; 104 1/4 x 130 inches; framed: 109 11/16 x 135 7/16 x 4 7/16 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 840:1983

Max and Morton: An Interlude

Though Morton May’s interest within German art was far from consistent—certain antithetical paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and George Grosz called his estate home—it was Max Beckmann’s work which constituted the nucleus of his collection.

Max Beckmann was down on his luck in the forties. After achieving great success during the Weimar years as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Hitler’s rise to power terminated his hopes of a peaceful life making art. He lost his teaching position, had hundreds of his works confiscated by the Nazis, and was forced to flee to the Netherlands. After surviving a heart attack and dodging German conscription, Beckmann caught a break: a vacancy in America allowed him to employ his pedagogical talents once more.

May started to collect Beckmann’s work after asking his brother-in-law Maurice Freedman for a “good artist not too well known in this country.” Given this query, it’s only natural that May assumed Beckmann to be some faraway virtuoso. Little did he know that Beckmann’s newly acquired teaching post was at Washington University, a short walk from May’s residence. The two became quick friends, and May—at the time an amateur painter—hired Beckmann as his tutor. Although their friendship was short-lived—Beckmann moved away from St. Louis shortly after his stint at WashU, and died three years after meeting May—it fueled May’s desire to collect Beckmann’s work. Venator recalls that May “explicitly… want[ed] to make the biggest collection of Max Beckmann’s art in the world.” Forty paintings and nearly 300 prints later, that’s what he had on his hands.

Beckmann’s early output belonged to the tradition of gritty realism, using vague but decisive brushstrokes to imbue then-contemporary disasters with classical pathos: his tumultuous “Scene from the Destruction of Messina”—a depiction of escaped convicts wreaking havoc after being freed by an earthquake in southern Italy—foregrounds numerous writhing figures redolent of the Hellenistic “Dying Gaul.” And the contemplative verism of late Roman sculpture is visible in the pensive survivors of Beckmann’s “Sinking of the Titanic.” But after volunteering as a medical orderly during the Great War, Beckmann’s paintings underwent a complete overhaul of content and style.

Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950; “The Dream,” 1921; oil on canvas; 71 5/8 x 35 13/16 inches framed: 80 5/8 x 42 1/2 x 1 7/8 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 841:1983

He abandoned his distinctive facture in favor of smoother shading and dramatically decreased the sizes of his canvases. (The two group scenes mentioned earlier measure in excess of eight feet across.) Subject-wise, Beckmann renounced realism: each painting became flatter and the figures within more stylized. Surrealist imagery entered his repertoire. Beckmann’s “The Dream” is characteristic of this period: amidst the carrying out of a series of nonsensical tasks by figures with closed eyes—a woman plays a stringless viol while an injured man lugs a fish up a ladder, among other things—a young girl, the painting’s sole open-eyed figure, discontentedly holds a doll. At the time, prewar idealism must’ve seemed like a theatrical reverie, one which much of Europe was still under the sway of, but from which Beckmann, like the girl, had unhappily awoken.

Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950; “The King,” 1933/37; oil on canvas; 53 1/8 x 39 3/8 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 850:1983

During the economically stagnant twenties and thirties, Beckmann’s style was anything but. As Germany’s political situation grew direr, his paintings became more urgent: no more spindly surrealist forms or carefully rendered light sources. Instead, he began using paunchy brushstrokes to delineate swaths of near-equal value, lending his works an air of glum efficiency, as if he’s rendered the greatest dejection with the fewest possible marks. “The King,” a self-portrait with his diminutive wife and a mysterious hooded figure, sees Beckmann crowned as the title royal. Grim shadows obscure the subjects’ visages. You can sense Beckmann subtly musing on what value, if any, his art held. Sure, making art is indisputably a noble thing to do—hence the regal garb—but is it worth pursuing at the price of your well-being? Given that Beckmann and his family had just fled to Amsterdam to escape Nazi persecution, questions like this were no doubt weighing on his mind. Also produced during his exile, “Acrobat on the Trapeze” features a sullen circus performer readying himself for a grand maneuver. That the daredevil act is theatrical doesn’t seem to lessen its horror in his eyes: after all, Beckmann and his countrypeople lived in a time when one’s art was literally a matter of life and death. When Morton May declared of his Beckmanns that “I’ve collected them because I’m not afraid of their strength,” he was undoubtedly thinking of these—Beckmann’s hefty facture delineates feelings of a depth that most others cannot readily draw from.

Max Beckmann, German, 1884–1950; “Portrait of Morton D. May,” 1949; oil on canvas; 30 × 20 inches framed: 38 1/8 × 28 1/8 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Morton D. May 861:1983

It wasn’t until 1949, the year before Beckmann’s death, that he painted the portrait of his most eager patron. The SLAM’s “Portrait of Morton D. May” features a middle-aged man in formal attire. Both of his hands hang rigidly in front of his chest, while his tentative facial expression betrays some inner stress. “It’s a rendering of an emotionally distraught person, which is the way I was at the time,” May said of the portrait. Although Beckmann’s ability to unearth his sitters’ most carefully hidden desires wasn’t universally appreciated—May’s wife and friends hated the painting—there was nobody with more earnest enthusiasm for his penetrating psychic insights than Morton D. May.

Desolation

If World War I provided German art with proof that its logical premises were incorrect, World War II (and the Nazi rise that precipitated it) proved something far more sinister: that no appropriate premise seemed to exist. Embedded in Nazi ideology from the start was the idea that modern art is inherently “degenerate,” a label which grew to encompass virtually all novel German art of the previous four decades. Modernist artists’ work wasn’t just condemned in name, either: they were stripped of their faculty positions and forbidden from exhibiting, selling and sometimes even producing more work. Many fled the country to avoid conscription and state persecution. Colossal quantities of existing “degenerate” art were seized from German institutions and destroyed. What’s left today in collections like that of the SLAM are, as Venator states, the “rare survivors of a thirteen-year campaign to erase all traces” of German modernism.

Without the Nazis’ seizing of expressionist masterpieces, however, the SLAM would never have possessed a fraction of the German collection it holds today. Between the end of the Great War and Hitler’s condemnation of “degenerate” art, many prominent German art dealers emigrated to New York City, bringing paintings with them as stock. A great deal of these works were eventually purchased at low prices by one Morton D. May. Many more, however, took a route of greater ethical ambiguity. After confiscating boatloads of work from art museums, the Nazis began selling it on the international market to raise party funds. Many German expat dealers in New York City—Curt Valentin and Erhard Weyhe, to name a couple—would purchase paintings at dirt-cheap prices from party-sanctioned dealers in Berlin before reselling them on the East Coast with large markups. (Even with the surcharges, Valentin and Weyhe’s asking prices were still much cheaper than those of comparable School of Paris works.)

While May was accumulating his expressionist collection during the forties and fifties, the next generation of German artists was coming of age. They lived to see West Germany become flooded with American influences—magazines, advertisements and the like—while failing to meaningfully confront its slaughter of six million Jews only decades earlier. Mocking both the utopian project of Socialist Realism and superficial cultural artifacts of the United States, they adopted the moniker “Capitalist Realism.” While the movement emerged as a facetious response to West Germany’s perceived one-dimensional culture, its members eventually attempted to answer a far more serious question: after the Holocaust, what can be meant by “German identity?” Unlike their expressionist predecessors, these artists—chief among them Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke—enjoyed worldwide commercial success early in their careers. Seeking to enrich Morton May’s bequest with work by Germany’s most promising contemporary artists, SLAM personnel managed to acquire two of the period’s masterpieces.

Peter Schjeldahl once called Gerhard Richter’s “Betty” “the single most beautiful painting made by anyone in the past half century.” High praise, but you’ll find yourself agreeing the instant you see it. Painted in Richter’s signature photorealistic style, it is a hauntingly true-to-life depiction of his daughter wearing a comfy pink blouse and a floral red-on-white jacket you feel like you could touch. Her pose is tantalizingly unresolved: her body faces the viewer, but her head and torso have been turned the other way, perpetually enacting the instant before she turns her head to look at you.

Richter painted it in 1988, when German collective identity was as fragmented as ever: the Berlin Wall still divided the country’s capital, precluding a true sense of unified German culture. One can imagine the questions weighing on Richter’s mind at the time: how could the German people ever have elected the Nazis by popular vote? How could the country ever atone for the atrocities it perpetrated during the war? And how had Germany, split into Eastern and Western portions, come to be nothing more than two Cold War pawns? The answers to all of these questions, like Betty’s averted gaze, are just out of reach, never to be grasped except as vague inclinations.

If Richter’s method of introspection was to paint what he saw down to the atom, his countryman Anselm Kiefer took a more circuitous route. Like most of Kiefer’s oeuvre, the SLAM’s “Breaking of the Vessels” uses industrial substances to synthesize poignant universalities so sharp they could cut you—literally, as surrounding its central bookcase are countless hazardous shards of glass. Kiefer frequently probed the German collective consciousness’ response to the Holocaust, which manifests itself here in a not-so-thinly veiled reference to Kristallnacht, the Nazi raid in which the windows of Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues were smashed all across Germany. But the sculpture’s dangling pane of glass with inscription “Ain Soph Aur”—in Hebrew, “Infinite Light”—and its esoteric title reveal Kiefer’s simultaneous interest in the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, whose primordial account holds that when divine attributes were placed in vessels too fragile to hold them, they cataclysmically ruptured—an event which resulted in the creation of our multiplicitous physical world.

Rather than retreating into the spiritual realm, Kiefer fashions a lens through which our material world can be viewed. What appears when you look into it? Well, it depends. But the parallel Kiefer draws between shattered primordial vessels and smashed Jewish storefronts incontrovertibly carries out a task which consumerist West Germany, he reasoned, was all too self-obsessed to carry out: it brings viewers one step closer to reckoning with the incomprehensible loss of Jewish life which took place under the Nazis.

Coda

While examining Germany’s twentieth-century art doesn’t yield the existence of a singular “German” style, we can point to a distinct shared goal among its artists: to render fundamental truths—whether they be emotional, social or heavenly—with the greatest intensity possible given an artist’s meager toolbox. Its aestheticians were embattled sentimentalists who, confronted with a grisly European landscape, renewed their faith in art’s communicative abilities—where it seemed like there was nothing to be said, they rendered that nothing in emphatic, impassioned flourishes. Whether or not we self-important Midwesterners will head to the SLAM to witness this cultural moment, it happened, in a frenzy one part talent, nine parts dogged persistence.