by Nancy T
Originally published in Currents April/May 2004

A favorite standing exhibition in Hamburg, part of a permanent collection one can reliably visit (unless a painting or two is temporarily on loan to another show), is the Max Beckmann room in the Kunsthalle’s Gallery of Classical Modernism.

Passing through the museum entrance’s beautiful “echo chamber,” and presenting my museum pass to the cashier, (which is available for as little as EUR 25 a year, depending on the chosen category), a glass door appears at the junction of the dual staircases leading to all the paintings, the entrance to a charming room with the atmosphere of an ivy league collegiate library. This comfortable, woodpaneled room, the Kupferstichkabinett, is the resource center for the museum, equipped with computers for the visitors. Their website, www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de, has an English option. What is unique about this resource center is that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays between 14:00 and 17:00, you can request to see any original works on paper (prints, drawings, watercolors) in the museum collection storehouse (all works that are not hanging in one of the four Kunsthalle galleries) – and that collection is vast. You can only view the works in the room, nothing can be taken past the glass doors, but it is a real treat to have an original Kirchner in your own hands for a private viewing and a great chance to truly study. If you choose to just use the Kupferstichkabinett, and forego seeing the museum, you pay only EUR 2! – It’s free if you have a museum pass.

Back on track to Beckmann, climb the stairs, check out the rotunda to see whatever visiting exhibition is there – or turn right once inside the Gallery of Old Masters and walk straight through to its end, down a few steps that pass a short exhibition of materials used in painting, and through a new set of glass doors that bring you to the Gallery of Classical Modernism.

Beckmann’s is the last room directly at the end of the corridor – which allows us to see a lot of art along the way! A favorite painting on the path is Christian Schad’s 1928 portrait of the journalist Egon Erwen Kisch. Kisch had just written a best selling novel and was at the height of his career. Schad paints him sitting on a high scaffold looking over a city, not dressed up, but relaxed and showing all his tattoos. It is a highly finished and powerful painting.

Singling out several favorites in the Max Beckmann room, one definitely is the 1928 Gypsy Woman. The composition of diagonals climbs the elegant vertical format leading to her portrait at the very top, where she is calmly combing her hair. There is a great freedom and confidence implied in the broad brushstrokes. Bold but unusual colors — for example chartreuse — are neutralized by the strong black outlines, making for very lively paintings. Another favorite, the happy, colorful Sea Lions has the exact same elegant format, although painted 22 years later in the US where he lived the last 3 years of his life.

Despite his long established and successful career in Berlin, and serving in the German army as a medic in WWI, Beckmann was declared a degenerate artist in 1937 and was forced to flee the country. He survived the next ten years as an exile in Amsterdam. Forbidden to travel, living in cramped quarters and dealing with wartime shortages and humiliations from the Nazis, Beckmann turned to mythology to understand his situation. The 1942 Odysseus and Calypso was painted in this period. Beckmann identified with Odysseus (he had taken on his personna similar to the way Frank Lloyd Wright had identified with King Arthur.) Odysseus’ portrait reveals the hopeless waiting to return to his homeland. This painting depicts an expatriot from a different time and can have a particular resonance for us as expats today.

After enjoying the Beckmann room, it is a bit of a rush to step outside into the lavish neoclassical foyer surrounding the marble staircase. The Classical Modern Gallery is very austere, with its boxy and harshly glaring white walls, nothing to distract you from the paintings. However, somehow they seem very tiny in the white glare. What a welcome gush of warmth comes from the wood panels and huge realist landscape paintings of an earlier time, of decoration and gracious living. The shallow steps of this beautiful staircase eat any clumsiness, and one floats along this luxury with the grace of an elf in Rivendell.

On the journey back to your coat, turn at the stairwell toward and through the restaurant veering to your left. This corridor leads to the bookshop. Here are many fine portraits along the way; of note is A Chinese Man, one of the many there by Anita Rée and Erich Bredl’s Karl Lorenz, a redhaired sitter with fantastically colored reflections in his eyeglasses.