fallen warriors, no lions riddled with bullets. Humbled mankind had no time for edification. Berlin maintained its tempo and lost its substance. The senseless idiocy of mechanization, the human absurdity of humans, animals, things which are nothing but instruments of commerce—all this formed itself, deformed itself, into pictures. The narrowness made faces crooked and legs twisted; tragi-comedies of things jammed together arose. Beckmann went straight through Berlin. Perhaps he is coming out beyond Berlin. Perhaps a Breughel. The metropolis of to-day discloses to him its barbaric mediaevalism. The horrors of the apocalypse are transformed into bursting corsets, into the horns of graphaphones, into the mugs of pimps grimacing under caps on sideways. They are brayed in a mortar.
The psychological significance of the episodes removes the question as to their aesthetic value. One doesn't ask a man being led to the scaffold what sort of hair tonic he uses. Therefore the suspicion can arise that Beckmann's pictures are purely phenomena of content. Let us recall that our northern primitive knew no other phenomena. They stood under the spell of a necessity which left room for sensory considerations only after the consummation of very unequivocal creeds. And, as is well known, the sensory was confined to the absolutely necessary. Form arose only from the depth of the emotion. Could it not be the same with Beckmann? Courbet, when asked what was the impetus for his pictures, was not embarrassed in declaring, Je suis ému." Beckmann could say the same of himself with less fear of making himself ridiculous. To be sure, the dangers of such emotion are close at hand. One can entangle himself in barbarism, in idées fixes; and many pictures of Beckmann's show signs of entanglement. Relentlessly, he says what is there, and he adds nothing, not even the baroque twist which permitted a Rubens to tear his Saint's tongue from his throat with the tongs in such a manner that our mouth waters with raptures over the texture. Also graphaphones, wooden legs, signboards, would be adapted to still lifes. He opposes himself to such adaptation. Occasionally he devotes himself to a fair. It is the only concession he allows himself. So we can imagine that things go that way only at a fair. Pious people who happen to stumble in on it. A bitter singer.
If we had only Beckmann, it would be enough to indicate the
