Theater of Cruelty (40 page)

Foujita’s second homecoming in 1933, accompanied by yet another wife, a French show dancer this time, named Madeleine Lequeux, was more successful, although still with ups and downs. He had a successful show in Tokyo. But in 1936, Madeleine, after a stormy few years, died in circumstances that were never fully cleared up. Foujita found new inspiration with a Japanese woman named Kimiyo, who became his last wife. And soon, newly enchanted by the sights and sounds of his native country, the rhythms of Kabuki music, the horns of the tofu vendors, Foujita was ready for a break with Europe: “Every day I wake up with the realization, ‘Oh, I’m in Japan,’ and a smile, full of fondness for the land of my birth, spreads over my face.”

His new enchantment with Japan produced some remarkably bad art. Japanese critics were right to dismiss his touristy pictures of sumo wrestlers and geishas as dilettantism. Stung by such criticisms, Foujita did what he had always been good at: he figured out his market. Soon this led to even worse kitsch, but it proved to be popular kitsch. He promised a wealthy collector that he would paint in record time “the world’s number one painting.” The result, completed in 174 hours, according to the collector who timed it, was a huge painting, sixty-seven feet long, of country life in northeastern Japan: village festivals, rice harvests, and so on. The painting is dense, colorful, and skillfully done, but, as Birnbaum says, devoid of emotional content.

The same techniques, the density of detail, the pictorial realism, would be applied a few years later to Foujita’s war paintings, celebrating Japanese victories in Southeast Asia or the self-sacrificing
heroism of Japanese soldiers in China. They were what finally made his name in Japan. People were moved to tears by the sight of Foujita’s pictures of carnage. Some fell on their hands and knees. “I was surprised,” recalled Foujita, “because this was the first time in my life that one of my works had affected people so much that they worshiped before it.” But even worship, though doubtless gratifying, doesn’t quite explain why the erstwhile companion of Picasso and Modigliani became such a zealous painter of war propaganda. Birnbaum quotes the American connoisseur of Japan Donald Richie:

This is probably true. But there was also an element of playacting about Foujita’s militarism, in line with his love of dressing up. Nomiyama Gyoji was an art student when he met Foujita during the war. In an interview with Birnbaum, he recalled his astonishment at the variety of clothes he found in Foujita’s wartime studio, outfits the artist had designed himself: jackets for firefighting, and various quasi-military uniforms with red boots and green double-vests. Nomiyama remembers thinking that Foujita was “just amusing himself with this war. War for him is only a source of entertainment.”

On the other hand, as Birnbaum says, the wartime paintings express visions of darkness and cruelty that are unusual in propaganda art. Actually, this was less unusual in Japanese wartime movies, novels, and artworks than in similar fare in Europe or the US. The more horrific the scenes of battle looked, the more people could admire the hardships and sacrifices of the Japanese troops. But Nomiyama pointed out something else about Foujita’s paintings that was unusual.
“In Foujita’s paintings,” he said, “you don’t feel that there is any difference between the enemy dying and Japanese dying. Everyone looks so sad.”

Perhaps the most revealing comments came from the artist himself, when he declared in 1942, with evident satisfaction, that “all ties with the French art world have been severed.” It would no longer be necessary to imitate foreigners:

This sounds like the kind of lacerating confessions made under Stalinism, especially when he talks about the necessity to make popular art “correct in the details” and “without mistakes in the realistic effects.”

The perverse thing about all this is not just the almost masochistic repudiation of everything Foujita himself had believed in but also the sense of liberation. His reputation in the West had declined considerably since the heady 1920s. But from now on he no longer had to live up to the standards of Paris, or anywhere else in the West; the common Japanese people, and not the critics or those liberal Jewish gallery owners, would henceforth be his judges. The style of the wartime paintings, however, was more derivative from Western art than his work in Paris.

As is so often the case, not just in Japan, commercial instincts proved remarkably flexible when circumstances shifted. As soon as the Americans set foot on Japanese soil, Foujita burned incriminating documents in his garden, doctored his wartime paintings, and offered to work for the occupation authorities. He even produced
Christmas cards for occupation officials, which were sent to General MacArthur and President Truman. Perhaps because of his unusual degree of opportunism, other Japanese artists began to treat Foujita as a pariah. The newly formed Japanese Art Association put him on the list of culprits who should bear responsibility for their wartime activities. Not surprisingly, Foujita quickly reverted to his pre-war disdain for Japan and infatuation with the West.

France was his preferred destination, but the French were reluctant to give the ex–war propagandist a visa. Through his connections in MacArthur’s administration, Foujita managed to land some teaching jobs in New York, at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the New School. He left Japan in 1949, and by way of a permanent farewell he prayed that the Japanese art world would one day come up to world standards. In New York, he had a show at the Mathias Komor gallery.
Time
magazine praised his pictures of animals in human clothes, but a petition signed by fifty American artists protested against the exhibition by “the fascist artist who lent himself to lying and distortion.” When a French visa was granted after all, Foujita quickly decided to move back to France.

He shunned Paris, the city of his early triumphs, and secluded himself in an eighteenth-century farmhouse with Kimiyo, renamed Marie-Ange-Claire after their baptism into the Catholic Church. They became French citizens in 1955. Foujita still produced a great deal of art, notably many pictures of cats and rather vapid-looking children. In the mid-1960s, with money from René Lalou, the president of Mumm Champagne, he constructed a chapel in the Romanesque style. He claimed that this was “to atone for eighty years of sins.” The frescoes, painted by Foujita, which include the artist and his wife as witnesses to the crucifixion of Christ, and the stained-glass windows are decorative in a conventional way, and full of detail, rather like his wartime propaganda paintings.

Foujita died of cancer in 1968. Birnbaum describes his last days in a Swiss hospital. Instead of the more usual hospital robes worn by other patients, Foujita posed for his visitors in a Japanese fisherman’s coat, covered in images of fish and the sea.

MAX BECKMANN WAS
born in 1884 in Leipzig, and died on December 27, 1950, in New York City. He was, I think, the greatest painter to emerge from the brief but extraordinary artistic big bang of Weimar Germany. If he is less famous than some more sensational figures, it is because he was never a joiner. Beckmann went his own way, always. This is what George Grosz, a fellow New York émigré, wrote after his death: “Beckmannmaxe was a kind of hermit, the Hermann Hesse of painting, German and heavy, unapproachable, with the personality of a paperweight, utterly lacking in humor.”
²

There was perhaps some truth to this none too friendly thumbnail sketch. Beckmann was not an easygoing man. His idea of a good
evening out was to sit alone, dressed in a formal suit, at the bar of an expensive hotel, silently observing other people over the rim of his champagne glass. In his own house, he insisted on punctual appointments. If a person turned up even a few minutes early, Beckmann would come to the door and announce that Herr Beckmann was not yet at home. When he wasn’t working, he read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Romantic poetry, or books about mysticism. In 1924, he began a series of ironic self-descriptions with the following statement: “Beckmann is not a very nice guy.”
³

As for Hermann Hesse, it is true that Beckmann was interested in metaphysical painting, in creating images to express spiritual feelings, in “rendering the invisible visible through reality.” He saw the artist as God or, rather, as the creative rival of God. Grosz rather despised all this. He was a political man-about-town, inspired by the streets, a brilliant and savage caricaturist, who once described his drawings as graffiti on a toilet wall. To him, Beckmann was a plodding German dreamer who hadn’t moved with the times, and “stupidly clings to the day before yesterday.” In New York, said Grosz, photography, window displays, and Disney cartoons were much more exciting than painting. “Rimbaud,” he said, “and the great Marquis de Sade would have loved it here.… But Beckmannmaxe, he didn’t like people. A humorless man.”

Whether he knew it or not, Grosz’s blustering put-down revealed his own relative weakness as an artist and Beckmann’s strength. Seduced by the flash of American commerce, Grosz lost much of the creative power that had made him a great satirist of Berlin between the wars. Beckmann, the visionary loner, oblivious to artistic or commercial fashion, continued to paint masterpieces in Berlin, Frankfurt,
Amsterdam, St. Louis, and New York City. (He was briefly a professor at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.)

Almost all of these pictures are now on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
⁴
The exhibition does him proud. With a minimum of words, and a maximum of space around the paintings, the visitor is encouraged to look at the art as one should, at one’s leisure, without the distractions of theory or overelaborate explanation.

The curators did one odd and interesting thing: they put Beckmann’s first major work,
Young Men by the Sea
(1905), at the very end of the exhibition, after his last painting,
The Argonauts
(1950), as though his painting life came full cycle, which in a way it did. But young men by the sea was a recurring theme. He painted one in 1943, and at various other times too. As in most Beckmann paintings, the scene of the first
Young Men by the Sea
is a blend of naturalism and myth. The naked young men, sunk in various poses of deep meditation, while one plays a flute, could be a group of German nudists, but also Greek gods come to earth. Beckmann remarked to his wife that the flute player was similar to the Orpheus figure in
The Argonauts
, and he appears in the 1943 painting as well, as the prototypical artist.

Space, the idea of infinity—hence the prevalence of the sea—and the place of human beings in it was one of Beckmann’s constant preoccupations. In a letter written in 1948, Beckmann said, “Time is a human invention, but space is the palace of gods.”
⁵
The human figures in his first major painting, which still shows the influence of Cézanne, are posed in a fairly conventional manner. Later, to illustrate
the fall of man, or the voyage of Ulysses, or Orpheus’s descent into the underworld, the positioning of Beckmann’s figures in space would become far more eccentric; hurtling into the sea, or suspended from heaven, or riding on monstrous fish.

The Argonauts
, described as a reworking of his first
Young Men by the Sea
, is much more explicit in its symbolism. Jason and his fellow Greeks, the original Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, have been transformed into artists. On the left side of the triptych is a painter and his model, on the right is a group of female musicians, and in the middle are two nude men with the sea in the background. One of them, Orpheus, is staring into the eye of a great bird. A lyre lies by his side. The other looks toward the horizon, following his inner vision, “oblivious,” in Beckmann’s description, “to his earthly surroundings.”
⁶
Between them is an old man, bearded like a biblical prophet, climbing a ladder. Beckmann described him as a god pointing the way to a higher form of existence. The picture is an affirmation of Beckmann’s belief in art as a transcendental medium, hence the triptych, as though it were meant for a church devoted to the arts.

The Argonauts
has been described as Beckmann’s greatest work. I’m not so sure of that. The symbolism is indeed a little heavy, and if all Beckmann’s work had been like this, Grosz would have had a point about the old German dreamer. I prefer Beckmann in his more sardonic, earthier, or more savage moods. Like Rembrandt and Dürer, Beckmann was a great and prolific painter of self-portraits, recording his moods, which are, it must be said, rarely lighthearted.