Read This Now: "Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings"

Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings (Prestel Publishing/DelMonico Books/Saint Louis Art Museum, 2015): Like the Arch, SLAM’s Beckmann holdings seem so St. Louis, we take them for granted. But also just like the Arch, we know they’re works of genius, even if we don’t appreciate them the way we should. Go see “The Artist and the Modern Studio,” in Galleries 234 and 235 in the old Cass Gilbert Building, and notice how Beckmann’s studio paintings have been hung right next to Picasso’s. Now that you’ve put Beckmann back in proper art world context, seek this book out. Written by Harvard Art Museums curator Lynette Roth with a preface by SLAM curator Simon Kelly, this 272-page beaut not only features full color reproductions of Beckmann’s work—including early paintings very different from his later Expressionist work—but also puts his time in St. Louis in context. After being denounced as a “degenerate artist” by Hitler, Beckmann fled to Amsterdam, then moved to St. Louis in 1947 after securing a teaching post at Washington University. Though his time here was brief, it was richly productive (he painted every day), and it was where he crossed paths with department store magnate Morton D. May—who commissioned a portrait and would eventually own the largest Beckmann collection in the world, which is why we are lucky enough to see so many Beckmann paintings at SLAM nearly 70 years later.