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” nineteen ...

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