I just came across this passage from an old journal, written on Friday, January 25, 1985, after visiting the great Max Beckmann retrospective at the LA County Art Museum (9 December 1984 – 3 February 1985) for the second time:
Beckmann’s landscapes are nice and open in a way the figure compositions are not. Evening on the Terrace, 1928, striped pink under pink clouds from blue sky into darker blue sea — light rays striking the surface of the water. Similar shafts of light in yellow-orange diagonal stripes w/ blue stripes between in a more tumultuous North Sea Landscape I (Storm), 1937. The landscape watercolors are ok.
Ah, youth, my younger self. Ignorant and impressionable, but heartfelt and earnest. When I viewed those paintings and wrote about my experience viewing them, I of course had no inkling that 30 years later I could just look up each painting on a magical global information network, using a dreaded computer no less. Times change, as they usually seem to do.
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