Volume 43, Number 19 · November 28, 1996
Bridges to the Invisible
By John Updike
Max Beckmann in Exile 1997 Barbara Stehlé-Akhtar, Reinhard Spieler, Stephan Lackner, Max Beckmann, and Eric Fischl.
exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo October 9, 1996-January 5,. Catalog of the exhibition with contributions by Matthew Drutt,
Guggenheim Museum, 142 pp., $33.95
Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950
by Max Beckmann, edited and translated by Barbara C. Buenger
University of Chicago Press, 420 pp., $34.95
Descend with me to lower Broadway and the Guggenheim Museum there (suggestive, in its converted old warehouse, of a discount outlet for the goods on display in the chic spiralling main emporium on upper Fifth Avenue) and discover, upon arising from the subway and perambulating half-gentrified streets thronged with jubilantly hairy youths and tall thin girls clad entirely in this season's remorseless black, and then upon threading through the bustling museum shop, with its plastic spread of modernist kitsch, past the vast flashing bank of computer-manipulated, laserdisc-fed television monitors designed by Nam June Paik and entitled Megatron—discover, I say (its doors as discreetly marked as its financial sponsorship by Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank), an exhibit of twenty-one late paintings, including seven of his famous triptychs, by Max Beckmann (1884-1950).
Review, 2516 words
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