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This Bealtaine Exhibit of Carrickahowley Gallery takes a different approach to Irish and Irish American art. Expanding the Featurette element of our exhibits into a featured exhibit, we seek to educate and raise awareness of a historical connection that few Americans may have learned: the school of painting originally known as Boston Expressionism, and later as American Figurative Expressionism. Come with us down the rabbit hole to engage in an art history lesson that tells another story of American art, art and politics, modern art and the transatlantic connection, and, perhaps appropriate to our time, the resistance to art censorship.

In 1937, the German Nazi party under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels and sanctioned by Adolph Hitler, staged an exhibit that has become famous: the Entartete Kunst show, or the Degenerate Art Exhibit. Set up almost across the street from the exhibit of sanctioned German art, this show was designed to inculcate deep resentment against the arts and artists of the Weimar and the modernist movement in Europe especially. Showing over 600 works by artists deemed by the state to represent “degeneracy,” the exhibit denounced modernism as a “criminal” act against German values and society. Despite such efforts, the Entartete Kunst exhibit was enormously popular (over 1 million Germans viewed the exhibit), and would go on to tour Europe for three years after its opening.

Among those artists selected for the exhibit were a number of German artists who would have their paintings and sculptures confiscated and destroyed, while they themselves were either forced into exile or arrested and imprisoned. Nazi sympathizer Emile Nolde was forbidden from even buying paint, in one of the greater ironies, and while the Entartete Kunst show focused upon “Jewish tendencies” in art, only six of the artists shown were Jewish. Others were labeled as Jewish as a label of condemnation, and were fired from their posts at universities and art schools.

Max Beckmann was one such artist who was fired and forced to flee into exile during the Nazi regime. He would find a temporary home in Amsterdam where he would work for ten years producing an astonishing number of expressionist paintings. Eventually, Beckmann came to the US, working at Washington University in St. Louis (a city which now houses many of his works), and then on to New York, where he would die of a heart attack while on his way to view a painting accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While over 500 of his paintings were destroyed by the Nazi regime, Beckmann would live on, remarkably, in the minds of young American painters who were heavily influenced by his figurative style. In particular, Philip Guston, Nathan Olivera, Ruben Kadish, and many others would regard Beckmann as a major influence, and would develop styles quite indebted to his brilliance. So influential was Beckmann that he is often credited as being one of the major figures in the Boston Expressionist style that would emerge in the 1930s and 40s. Brought to the fore by Karl Zerbe in particular, Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and others would lecture in Boston and radically alter American art. And this is where the connections get really interesting! The Boston Expressionists stood in stark contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Gorky, DeKooning, and Jackson Pollock, who had all rejected representational painting in favor of formalist experimentation and a depoliticized art. That distinction would grow into a movement called American Figurative Expressionism practiced by renowned painters on the US east coast and across the country like Philip Guston, Hyman Bloom, Kahlil Gibran, and Jack Levine. As Wikipedia sums up the artists influenced by this movement, they included:

Carl Pickhardt, Reed Champion, Kahlil Gibran, John Northey, Esther Geller, Thomas Fransioli, Ture Bengtz, Giglio Dante, Maud Morgan, and Lawrence Kupferman. (In her memoir, Jean Gibran noted the photo's resemblance to the iconic Life magazine photo of "The Irascibles," taken in 1950, and adds, "But the true 'irascibles' were the Boston artists.") Other artists in this group included David Aronson, Jason Berger, Bernard Chaet, Reed Kay, Jack Kramer, Arthur Polonsky, Henry Schwartz, Barbara Swan, Mel Zabarsky, Lois Tarlow, and Arnold Trachtman. Mitchell Siporin, who directed the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University in the 1950s, is sometimes included in this category.

And, finally, that movement continues to this day in various forms, particularly in my art, which roots itself in this very genealogy.

The fascinating point about Beckmann’s confrontation with the Nazi regime and its censorship is that it focused upon the influence of medieval German art, just as the Nazi’s did. The trope of the Middle Ages would inform much of Nazi art and performance spectacles, attempting to root German art in the nostalgic appropriation of what it considered to be “pure art.” Rather than modernism’s “excrescence,” Hitler, Goebbels, and the official Nazi state line would regard “pure art” as the art of Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, all with the intent of upholding what it considered to be Aryan values. For artists like Max Beckmann, however, the art of the Middle Ages in Europe was entirely relevant in its other worldliness, its dark humor and would give to German Expressionism its particularly unsettling treatment of the human body and of compositional space and its stark vision of humanity. The history of American art is therefore also a history of medieval European art transformed into a twentieth century history of an art of critique, of protest, and of anguished search for a revolutionary humanism. From censored artists to now translated artists, the emigres from Europe would reinvent not only American ways of seeing, but also new ways to resist state control.

In an age where such censorship is quickly rearing its ugly head in American artistic institutions, museums, markets, and studios, such histories can relocate our understandings of our own roles and our own genealogies, our connections to a struggle that precedes us and yet now may envelope us. As Beckmann and his later admirers would indicate, resistance to such regimes of censorship is possible. Perhaps the crucial first step is to look back and recognize the ghosts that point the way forward…

And so, we at Carrickahowley Gallery offer this road sign as a heartfelt sign of Spring and renewal. Explore the Danforth Museum’s wonderful collection of Boston Expressionism on a spring road trip perhaps? Or, reflect on the ways that art never follows the proscribed path, but nearly always finds its way to new possibilities.