by John Doughboy
Max (not Beckmann, not the Beckmann, another Max from another time, from this time—checks watch—more or less) dragged his twelve-year-old daughter Minna to see the Beckmann exhibition (yes, the Beckmann, that Max—Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann, born in Leipzig in 1884, New Objectivity painter, German artist labeled degenerate by the Nazis, medieval modernist who fled and fled and fled ending up, like so many emigres, in America) because he figured, this other Max, struggling artist that he was—struggling to make art, to be an artist, a man, a father, to be understood, to attract people who might care enough to attempt to understand him—figured (dubiously, we contend) that seeing Beckmann’s work would help his daughter truly see him. Hi, dad, I love you. Or something to that effect.
Beckmann (the) arrived in Cleveland, resplendent in this season’s hottest art world accolades, in the form of a grand retrospective of his work. Max (not the, the other) had been eleven times already (we pat him on the head: full marks, Max, dear boy, you’re a true devotee, we never doubted you). He let his eyes roam over and pour into representative works spanning Beckmann’s entire life, trying to absorb the painter’s vision, to commune with the dead artist through his living works. And why not? Beckmann himself wrote that he wanted to take part in his viewers’ boredom and dreams and they in turn in his and that this mystical mind meld was a desirous part of the art viewing and art making process. Our contemporary Max (who had plenty of dreams and boredom to share, no shortage there, rest assured) hoped seeing the great man’s work with his daughter would change him, her, and the work itself, creating a web of meaning—spin, image! spin, symbol! hear the mystical thread unspool!—between all three and this bond could be something to build off, as an artist, yes, but just importantly, as a father.
“Beckmann, again?” his daughter asked. “Aren’t you sick of him yet?” (A fair accusation, in its way, because Max had been laboring in Beckmann’s shadow since his art school days, since before Minna was even born, and had disappointed his daughter countless times by giving her not a pony or a doll or a Nintendo Switch or a celebrity beauty treatment like a facial made of ground-up rubies, but Beckmann, Beckmann, Beckmann. All manner of Beckmann: framed posters, fat biographies and monographs, even a sack-like sundress he found online that was, the seller claimed, “inspired by the works of Max Beckmann” and featured a pattern of ugly, somber, lopsided trumpets). But today wasn’t about memorabilia or museum souvenirs or trinkets. An encounter with the great man himself. Or, since he was dead, the next best thing: his work. Ahem, His Work.
Max picked Minna up at her mother’s place in Chagrin Falls (it’s a real place; google it if you don’t believe us). A Prairie Style house built by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s own disciples, its only Christmas decoration was the giant red bow wrapped round it (red, as any art historian worth his salt will tell you, symbolized power in the Renaissance, strength and riches, though in Beckmann’s Self-Portrait with Red Scarf from 1917 the art jury is out on what exactly it symbolized: defiance of God in a godless world ravaged by World War 1? The blood and guts of his comrades in the trenches? Beckmann’s inner dandy?). Max knew the house wasn’t a present for him. But he didn’t know how Minna felt—about him, about art, about anything. He hadn’t seen her in person in two years even though he’d moved to Cleveland four months ago to reconnect (reconnect being his therapist’s word; to him, when he thought of Minna, of moving back to be near Minna, the word that came most readily to mind was salvage with redemption a close runner-up). Minna had grown up. A gangly girl with her mother’s curly red hair and his mother’s narrow shoulders. A person with their own inner life, their own opinions. What then was her opinion of him?
And why Beckmann, indeed (we’ll never know because knowing isn’t in the cards for the human animal but that won’t prevent us from venturing a guess or two, will it?).
The great German painter had been dead for seventy years and yes, they shared a first name which may have been the initial superficial source of Max’s interest in his work—a frisson of narcissistic recognition, hello, handsome—when he was in art school in Boston, working as a freight elevator operator and reading fat art books (we almost said fart books which wouldn’t have been entirely inaccurate because Max lived off bean burritos in those down-and-out school days and often filled the elevator with his resultant flatulence) when work was slow. Beckmann bucked the trend towards abstraction and rejected Matisse and Picasso and that part of their legacy. An Expressionist who rejected the term. Max felt an echo of this in himself (self, self), a minor contrarian moving to the east coast to study art history when his father could have gotten him into the Teamsters back in Chicago. Forty or fifty years in a gray warehouse unloading brown boxes and sure, the pay and benefits were solid, but Max couldn’t imagine seeing so little of the world. Though, in retrospect, what had he ended up seeing? Up and down went the elevator, up and down, fate, up and down, fortune. Then, more recently, more regularly: just down.
Minna plopped into the backseat as if Max’s beat-up Volvo were a taxi and he nothing more than her driver. “I want to get my MBA and start an organic, ethically-sourced cosmetics company.”
“Cosmetics?” Max asked, eyeing Mina’s freckly skin in the rearview mirror.
“Ethically-sourced,” she repeated, scrunching into the corner to prevent the dried paint and charcoal dust and odd gray balls of kneaded eraser on the cushions from sticking to her baggy jeans.
And perhaps that’s what they were—strangers. To each other and themselves (Beckmann himself wrote that “we still do not know what this Self really is, this Self in which you and I in our various ways are expressed,” but he betrayed a bit of optimism, despite all the horrors of the early twentieth century he’d lived through, witnessed, been hounded and formed by, and added, “we must peer deeper and deeper into its discovery.”).
Minna spent the thirty-minute drive to the Cleveland Museum of Art checking her phone (ok, not her phone; we’re not a bunch of out of touch fogeys; through her phone she checked on her friends, their classes and crushes and eating disorders; on strangers making videos of their lives on the other side of the planet: a Chinese woman on a trampoline with her three malamutes; a janitor in Kobe making origami out of KitKat wrappers; a zoologist in Mongolia wrestling a red panda; she checked the weather: 38 degrees, chance of a wintry mix of sleet and rain, maybe even flurries in the evening; consumed a meme or two; watched an up-and-coming comic perched awkwardly on a tiny stool bemoan his troubled childhood; passively viewed pictures of atrocities occurring simultaneously on three different continents; looked up statistics about drive-times in northeastern Ohio and so on, you get the idea) and ignoring Max’s factoids about Beckmann (Chagrin Falls, huh?).
Not that this deterred Max. As they left the Christmasified suburbs behind them, Max delivered a mini lecture on Beckmann, “He was an egoist, do you know what that means? And he projected this ego outward, projecting himself into the world and onto his subjects (yes, Max, we feel it ourselves, these egoistic emanations; heck, maybe that’s all we are, interrupting your story like this? Shared boredoms and dreams. Deep peering). Herr Beckmann didn’t merely paint people as he saw them, Minna,” Max continued, “but used them to paint himself, to discover his self through this act of painting. This dialogue of painting, of seeing and seen.” Max looked in the rearview mirror again to see if his erudition was having the desired effect.
“Sounds like a narcissist,” Minna said without looking up (clever girl, therapized, well-versed in the lingo of mental health).
“You’ll understand when you see the work. You’ll see,” Max said (See! See! Painter’s and their obsession with the visual, the old ocular crutch). And he was convinced she would because she was his daughter, the daughter of an artist, a failed one who managed a small art supply store in a sleepy Midwest city, but an artist—Artist! Capitalize that A, you philistines!—all the same.
Even her mother Talia, artless shrew that she was or became or regressed into (these are Max’s words, mind you, not ours) had felt some of Beckmann’s magic when Max showed her Beckmann’s Still Life with Three Skulls on their third date and her first visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Beckmann’s thick black lines popping off the flat space of the canvas, fresh, as if the artist had only just painted them. The three skulls’ black sockets boring into them both. Max eventually bored Talia to the point that she divorced him and moved to Cleveland, marrying a successful personal injury lawyer named Bernard who managed, despite a busy schedule chasing ambulances, to be more of a father to Minna than Max had ever been (though Max knew first-hand the enduring allure of the absentee father and hoped it might be enough to draw Minna if not back to him, at least into his orbit).
Inside the museum, he vied with other Saturday morning museumgoers to find the optimal spots for Minna to engage—cue Symphony No. 9, Freude, (Freude), Joy, (Joy)—with Beckmann. With polite but insistent elbows, Max parted the sea of down coats to let Minna see Self-Portrait with Red Scarf, 1917. A crazed-looking Beckmann stares off to his left seeing—what? The dead and wounded he’d tended to as a medical orderly in the so-called War to End All Wars? His legacy? Max’s own dreams and boredom? (What are you seeing, Beckmann? We confess we too are curious).
“He could stand to gain some weight,” Minna offered, after glancing at the painting. “And some vitamin D. Look how pale he is.”
“The war drove many artists mad,” Max said, lamenting his own lack of military experience as if world history had passed him by and that was the reason his art was uninspired, untortured, unsuccessful.
“Bernard was in Iraq. Did you know?”
“No.”
“He was a communications guy in the army.”
“Making art can feel like waging war. Like communicating,” Max said.
Minna laughed though Max hadn’t meant it to be funny.
But what about Minna? Isn’t it time we heard from her? She was enjoying herself, actually, despite appearances to the contrary. She loved the museum. The stink of it. All the sweaty winter smells, the visitors who clearly hadn’t showered, greasy hair flowing out of Browns and Cavaliers beanies, grand old ladies in long wool coats with hair sprayed stiffly into place, her father’s ridiculous enthusiasm. For art? Beckmann? She suspected—Talia didn’t raise no fool—that Max’s enthusiasm was as much for her, a father buzzing with life and pride to be out on the town with his beautiful, intelligent daughter. But she wasn’t going to make it easy for him (and why should she, really? Yes, his intentions were noble but he had been absent, derelict in his fatherly duties, farting after a childish dream in Boston while his own child needed raising. Can we blame her for turning the screws a bit? Still, the buzzing was warm, familiar and welcome).
“Why are his hands so pale?” Minna asked in front of Self-Portrait in Front of Red Curtain, 1923.
“He was German. They’re pale.”
“But it looks like he’s wearing blusher.”
“Is he? Maybe he’s just flush.”
“With what?” She leaned closer to inspect the dead artist’s painted pores.
“Drink, maybe.”
Still examining the painting, Minna said, “Mom told me you’ve given up drinking.”
“It wasn’t good for me.”
“It wasn’t good for anyone.”
“I’m not that person anymore,” Max said, looking over his daughter’s narrow shoulders and the shadow beneath Beckmann’s nose (but did Max himself believe this? Do people change? Or are they always changing? A question for the ages, perhaps. Either way, above our pay grade and perhaps beyond the purview of this little story).
“Then who are you?” Minna asked but Max wasn’t sure if she was addressing him or Beckmann. He also wasn’t sure how to answer.
Max. After a combative childhood in Chicago with a domineering father, he went to art school to become, according to his father, a bum. And after graduation, Max had to admit his father hadn’t been wrong. The arts weren’t a growth industry (have they ever been?). Max hustled to have some solo shows at local galleries. At first, he had burned bright with booze and youth and creativity—throw another log on the fire, friends! A true artist walks amongst you! Open your best box of wine! A new prince has been crowned in the storied royal family going by the surname of Beauty! Until he burned out. Dethroned. Exiled to working a series of shitty odd jobs most days while Talia worked at a call center most nights and Minna, a tiny life which theirs had begun to revolve around, cried and shit and sniffled. Years passed like this (passed may be an ungenerous word, a bit bloodless; years were lived like this, experienced). Max creating a stack of paintings no one wanted to buy. Talia getting promoted. Minna growing up. Until, finally, Talia was promoted to a new branch in Cleveland, a regional director position. Something about sales that Max couldn’t understand (having had so little success with his own). And she was taking Minna with her and leaving Max behind. Which he accepted. He had his art, after all. He had what mattered. Didn’t he? We must peer deeper.
He exited the bathroom to find Minna considering an early drawing by Beckmann, Self -Portrait, 1901. An etching of a young man in pain or yawning or screaming. Minna said, “This reminds me of your stuff.”
“How so?” Max thought about lines and shading and the years he spent studying the human face and figure. The years he spent staring at others yet alone with his sketchpad or canvas.
“Sort of sad.”
“Sad, you say?”
“Yeah.” She walked on two steps ahead of him. “Sad.”
He followed her, wondering if there was pity in her “sad” and if this pity was the first wrung on the ladder to love and feeling that “sort of” contained some hope for happiness.
(We confess to deleting a scene here—obscuring may be a better word because it is happening, has happened, you’re just not seeing or hearing or reading or feeling it. We thought our father-daughter duo deserved some privacy for their first moment of genuine connection in years. Suffice it to say, hugs were had. Tears were shed. Stop prying.)
Let’s rejoin Max and Minna, then, in the evening, hours later, after hours of swapping boredoms and dreams with Beckmann, after a lunch of hot pho, after said hugs and tears and a return drive where Minna opened up, at first, tentatively, and then, gradually, with more and more zeal, her passion for cosmetics, for beautification, for moisture, for the health of the massive organ known as human skin and Max, in turn, told her about selling art supplies, managing a store, donating materials to local schools with struggling arts programs, running his fingers along the wall of specialty pens, all these little rituals of his day that connected him to his old dream albeit in a removed, sweetly melancholic way.
Now, they’re back in Chagrin Falls (it’s a real place; haven’t you googled it yet?). But neither knows how to end the day. If it ends, will the magic bubble of reconciliation they’ve created burst or expand and endure to envelope their worlds?
“Will you draw me?” Minna asks. They’re sitting on a bench looking at a park full of Christmas trees decorated by local businesses. Ornaments and tinsel and paper chains rustle in the cold breeze. Beyond the trees, the falls.
“A portrait? À la Beckmann?”
“À la you, dad.”
Max agrees. A portrait will be the perfect ending to this day. An ending but not the ending. An ellipsis, a pause, an opening…toward many more such days. Max grabs his sketchpad from the car and a 2B pencil. He squats across from Minna—those freckles, those curls, he can’t believe she’s his daughter, that he could have produced something, someone, so beautiful, from the wreckage of his life (but is it so wrecked, Max, or are you being a tad histrionic? After all, let’s take stock: you have a steady job, a car, an apartment in a relatively safe city in the developed world, a small but growing IRA, a beautiful daughter who, despite your absence and ineptitude, still loves you. What more could a man want?). Now he’s peering, sketching, the outlines of Minna’s head, ovals for eyes, the start of the nose and maybe if he shades in the bricks of the store behind her this could serve as a dark halo of sorts (sort of sad! Only sort of!) like an icon of Eastern Orthodoxy or is this Beckmann’s influence once again barging in? Stick to what you see, Max. Focus on the here (the Here!), the now (the Now), on your daughter (we’re rooting for you). Beckmann is a bug in his ear but Minna is right in front of him, “collagen is important, too, for the skin, for digestion, it even fights dementia,” she’s saying and Max starts to see her, not who he imagines her to be or fears her to be nor a canvas for him to project his own fragile self onto, his aspirations, his disappointments (and Beckmann is here, too, steadying his hand, aiding Max but not butting in) and Max is sketching her eyes, her brow, the shadows beneath and around them (and we’re here too Max, you can’t see us but that doesn’t mean we aren’t here) and her hair, the mass of it, the stray curls falling across her forehead, Max can’t believe how lucky he is, how strange and wonderful life is (and you’re here too, aren’t you? Max appreciates it—being seen. He thanks you for your support and attention), flurries are forming above Chagrin Falls and the details of the eye now, the pupils, the sclera, a tiny white canvas around the iris (how would Beckmann have handled this?) and Max pauses just to see Minna and Minna smiles, seeing him.
Jon Doughboy is a tireless and trusted voice in the prose advocacy community. See his latest PSA about the healing properties of prose @doughboywrites