ROUGH STUFF IN THE LIBRARY

SHORTLY after World War II, a grim, cliff-faced German named Max Beckmann arrived in the U.S. He was without honor in his own country; Hitler had branded him a "degenerate painter" and hounded him from the land. He had spent the war years in semi-hiding in Amsterdam, developing his own rainbow-hued brand of German expressionism. Imported by Washington University in St. Louis to teach art, Beckmann set about changing the course of American painting, and kept at it until his death in 1950. Although he himself was never an abstract painter, the New York school of abstract expressionists owes much to Beckmann for his unflagging insistence on directness and violence.

Among Beckmann's sponsors in St. Louis was Department Store Tycoon Morton D. May, an energetic collector of modern art. Last week in pictures from May's collection were on exhibit in the spanking-new library of St. Louis University, and the hit of the show proved to be 48 Beckmanns, the biggest and best collection of Beckmann's oils anywhere.

Sometime Khan. A forbidding and formidable hulk of a man, Beckmann yet had a sardonic humor about himself. For those who attempted to commiserate with him over the troubles he had seen, Beckmann had a short answer: "I deserve trouble. I myself am a reincarnation of Genghis Khan. I too am rough." To get acquainted with him, Collector May took the simple step of commissioning a portrait. May recalls: "He spent two weeks getting to know me before he even made a sketch. Then there were two sittings of not more than a half hour each. Before he started to paint, he had pulled out my history. He tried to paint much more than what's on the surface of the canvas." Bec":mann's The King (opposite) is something of a self-portrait, in which self-mockery and egotism blend. "For my money," says Millionaire May, "it's one of the greatest pictures of the 20th century."

The Bath (overleaf) May calls "simply one of the greatest pictures I have ever seen." In Still Life with Candle and Profile the sinister silhouette is Bec'imann's own. The Stormy Sea packs a vast lifting rush of waves into a narrow horizontal, as if it were seen through eyes half closed against salt spray.

Cursed and Blessed. Beckmann's pictures almost always symbolize the uncontrollable, or what he calls the "rough," but his vocabulary of yells, groans and occasional sighs of delight is drawn strictly from the natural world. "As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensualness," he once wrote, "I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness."

Will Beckmann's work live? No doubt, but for an unexpected reason: he commanded the rainbow; his use of color is as tender as a gardener's and as gracious as that of the most subtle housewife. He was less rough than he thought.

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