Provenance:

The artist’s studio

Erna Hanfstängl, Munich (probably acquired from the above after 1938)

deposited by the above for safekeeping at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich

Recovered by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section and transferred to Munich Central Collecting Point, no. 160027 (8 December 1945)

Returned to Erna Hanfstängl (2 September 1946)

Adolf Wüster, Munich (acquired circa 1948)

Kunstkabinett Klihm, Munich

Dr. Henry Goverts, Vaduz (acquired in 1950)

Galerie Ketterer, Campione d’Italia (acquired in 1967)

Sale: Sotheby’s London, 12 April 1972, Lot 43

Modarco Collection, Switzerland

Galerie Thomas, Munich

Private collection, Dortmund (acquired in 1976)

Van Beveren Expertise, The Hague

The Triton Collection Foundation (acquired from the above in 2008)

Max Beckmann’s Blühender Garten, 1933, shows a garden alive with energy, as if painted in a moment of calm before a summer storm. Beckmann’s powerful brushstrokes attract our attention with black outlines, quivering flowers and a quiet swimming pool lying massively in the foreground.

In 1933, the year he painted Blühender Garten, Beckmann was dismissed by the Art School in Frankfurt after Hitler was named Chancellor of the Reich. Beckmann would be ostracized as a ‘degenerate artist’ in the coming years, and finally fled to Amsterdam at the outbreak of World War II. This political tension simmers beneath the surface of Beckmann’s Blühender Garten.

The flowering garden of this work is that of the Villa Kaulbach – the Bavarian estate of Beckmann’s in-laws. Between 1930 and 1935, Beckmann and his wife, Mathilde ‘Quappi’ von Kaulbach, often traveled on holiday to the Kaulbach home in Ohlstadt, Upper Bavaria. Built by Quappi’s father, the noted painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach, the house had a large painting studio on the premises which Beckmann used frequently. The Villa Kaulbach became a welcome retreat for the artist, who, discouraged by fascist censorship of the German avant-garde, took the opportunity to devote time to his paintings of nature.

Beckmann began his career as a landscape painter, and always had a preference for the genre. While his atmospheric renderings of the natural world may suggest an Impressionist influence, the artist, in fact, allied himself more closely within the legacy of the Post- Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Beginning with Cézanne’s strong sense of pictorial order, Beckmann took a more patchwork approach to his landscapes, evident in the jagged brushstrokes and bold black lines of Blühender Garten, which stand in stark contrast to Cézanne’s layered, constructive application of paint.

Carla Schulz-Hoffmann remarked that “Beckmann’s work always exists on two levels […] even when a work appears as a breathtaking peinture, it lures the viewer into a deceptive security which is merely a façade for the abyss looming behind.” This is also evident in the present work.

While appearing as a simple garden scene, one cannot disentangle this striking work from the context in which it was painted – namely, the rising tensions in the artist’s hometown of Frankfurt, and his impending exile from Germany. Painted at a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, Blühender Garten is simultaneously a testament to the artist’s knowledge of the darkness of the world he was commemorating, and a celebration of the beauty of nature that continues to bloom, despite it all.