If we are convinced that painting is no longer a matter of the “pure eye,” as artists wanted it to be in the late 19th Century, and that it cannot be a pure didactic or “instructional” instrument such as it may have been in earlier centuries, we are compelled to accept today some variation of a “presentationalist” aesthetic. The painting is “all there”; it is to be seen. But if we make the further inference that the painter is precluded from having an attitude about things in the world, or assume that his imagery loses purchase and a fundamental meaning by the fact of being artistic, we commit either an arrogance or a superficiality. We must begin to see informed meanings in at least some of the paintings of our time.
The work of Max Beckmann offers an immediate and critical test of such an aesthetic. James Thrall Soby has said that his work may “one day seem to iconographers a particularly rewarding subject of research.” The implication may be, thouglh I doubt that Mr. Soby would want it to be, that a study of meaning must wait until the future, when the work will be seen from that “distance” at which inconographers ordinarily approach their subject. But it is an error to assume that we get the meaning of a painting by waiting until history has shaken off or sifted out the feeling we have for the concepts in the work; painting by its very nature compels a contemporary assent or dissent. Surely an inquiry into the meaning of such works as those of Beckmann ought to be undertaken now when the full complexities of his painterly statement are real to ourselves.
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