Restoring a Masterwork III: Max Beckmann’s Blind Man’s Buff
Restoring a Masterwork III:
Max Beckmann’s Blind Man’s Buff
Painting Blind Man’s Buff
Beckmann’s Journal Pages
Max Beckmann kept a diary throughout his life. He and his wife burned the diaries kept between 1925 and May 1940, so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Gestapo, but he filled—and saved—seven journals from his wartime exile. They are conspicuously small, ensuring that they could be easily hidden, and the names of acquaintances and friends are often encoded or abbreviated.
Despite this extraordinarily difficult period in Beckmann’s life, he documented a number of mundane details about his daily routine. The diaries mostly consist of notes about eating, drinking, strolls, and the progress of whatever the artist was working on at the moment. The war and Beckmann’s own deteriorating health are described pessimistically and briefly.
Max Beckmann, his wife Quappi, and his dog Butschy in front of Blind Man’s Buff with Perry Rathbone, director of the City Art Museum of St. Louis, 1948. University of Colorado Photolab Collection, no. 1975, Art Department, Max Beckmann Show. Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.
Beckmann began chronicling the creation of Blind Man’s Buff on September 30, 1944. His entries reveal much about his working habits. A brief summary:
September 30, 1944: “Vigorously on left and right panels of triptych The Concert or whatever.”
October 4: Beckmann speaks of the work as the Great Café.
October 18: He changes the title to the Great Bar.
From December 1944 through June 1945, the work is titled Great Cabaret.
Finally, at the end of March 1945, the central panel is started, and he makes rapid progress.
June 16, 1945: “…after four hours of work in the morning, center panel of Cabaret Grand has assumed definitive shape. That restored my courage.”
July 1: “Intensively and magnificently on center panel of Great Ox-Feast. I am certain that it is going to be my most outstanding picture.”
July 16: The center panel is reported “completed in a rough state.”
July 21: “Eight to 10 hours of work…but now satisfied with center panel of triptych.”
July 22: “Dog tired. Again five hours on Ox-Feast (almost finished).”
August 7: He changes the title to Blind Man’s Buff.
(During the rest of this month, he announces the completion of the triptych several times, but always returns to it to fuss over details.)
September 19: “Now I am finally finished with Blind Man’s Buff and regretfully I must leave these dark and yet so festive rooms.”
September 20: “Still one more farewell to the left panel by electric light—it was beautiful.”
On November 2, 1945, the triptych was packed and taken to the home of a friend where all of his completed paintings were hidden during the war.
Pages from Max Beckmann’s journal (September 30, 1944). Reproduced with permission from the artist’s granddaughter, Mayen Beckmann.
Beckmann in Exile
In 1937, while his paintings hung in the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition organized by the Nazis in Munich, Beckmann and his wife left Germany for good.
85 Rokin, Amsterdam, today. The three story white house at center is where the Beckmanns lived while in exile from 1937 – 1947/1948.
They made their way to Amsterdam, where his sister-in-law lived. Those who fled the Third Reich were generally endangered, and both the Dutch authorities and German intelligence kept emigrants’ activities under constant watch. The Beckmanns moved into a two-room apartment near the Jewish Quarter, and Beckmann witnessed deeply distressing events there during the Occupation. Deportation of the Amsterdam Jews took place from there; Beckmann made a reference to these events in 1943, noting in his journal, “In the afternoon, went through deserted streets of Jewish homes.”
The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. In the south of Amsterdam, where most German refugees lived, fires burned and toilets backed up for days as people disposed of potentially compromising papers. Beckmann, too, destroyed diaries and letters. To be in Amsterdam during the war meant omnipresent German soldiers, raids and deportations, curfews and food rationing. Gasoline shortages brought traffic to a standstill; by the end of the war, even bicycles were confiscated.
Helga Fietz, Max Beckmann in his Amsterdam studio, 1938. Max Beckmann Archiv.
After dolle dinsdag, the “Mad Tuesday” of September 5, 1944, when the citizens of Amsterdam waited in vain on roadsides, flowers in hand, for the entry of the Allies, things took a turn for the worse. The Dutch government-in-exile in London, expecting the imminent liberation of the country, called for a railway strike. The German occupying powers responded with a naval blockade. Food became scarce. Gas and electricity were shut off. Garbage collection ceased. Zoo animals were slaughtered. In the brutal winter of 1944-45, known in the Netherlands as the “Hunger Winter,” 20,000 people died. “Nothing in itself will ever again become so impossible,” Beckmann wrote in his diary in April 1945, “as the state of want and dissolution here.”
In September 1944, the Beckmanns were cut off from family and friends back in Germany, and they lived for a time on savings and the sale of belongings. Generally unbothered by the German authorities, Beckmann frequented the city’s cafés and bars, alone, quietly observing people. Once a celebrated artist, he became anonymous. In 1945, having reconnected with his New York dealer, he shipped his paintings to America and eventually made the journey himself, settling in St. Louis in 1947.