The immediate response to “Beckmann and Paris” is a classic, brow-smiting, “Of course!”[1] Setting the modern German master’s paintings alongside pictures by the French artists he admired and regarded as his peers is the obvious way to think about Beckmann. Still it is an imaginative, persuasive achievement by the show’s curators, since no exhibition like this has been organized before. Yet anyone who has looked attentively at Beckmann’s work is aware of how different it is from that of the Expressionists, his German contemporaries with whom he is frequently linked. This is not to discount the abundant evidence of Beckmann’s deep Northern roots; it’s plain that he owed an enormous debt to the most progressive German painters of the generation preceding his, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, who offered a model of expressive realism in place of the idealized romanticism of “official” nineteenth-century German art. Plainer still, Beckmann’s taste for Nordic myths and symbols, his love for the theatrical and the grotesque, and his super-heated palette of jewel-like colors, all make his work seem irreducibly Germanic.

In fact, despite its originality and individuality, the “northernness” of Beckmann’s art is so palpable and pervasive that it is easy to see why he is usually grouped with the German Expressionists. Yet it is equally easy to see that apart from this shared regional flavor (and a common distaste for the tawdriness of modern life) there is very little that connects the Expressionists’ rough-hewn images of a savage but familiar