Fresh from a press preview of the Max Beckmann retrospective at MOMA, Queens,[1] I was extolling the virtues of the show to a friend I am very fond of, someone whose fierce intelligence and astonishingly well-furnished mind always delight me. Our tastes often overlap, so I was startled when my enthusiasm was met by a laconic “I don’t like Beckmann.” (We quickly began talking about something else.) Earlier that day, a colleague at the preview had announced his indifference to the painter, but I’d dismissed it, since I’ve never been impressed by this critic’s eye. Yet at the same event, the show’s curator, Robert Storr—an ardent admirer of Beckmann and, to judge by the exhibition’s notably intelligent selection, someone who really “gets” him—had described the painter as “difficult to like,” in constrast to the more appealing Paul Klee, “the other great German painter,” whom Storr further categorized as Beckmann’s only real rival. The retrospective is so good that I was willing to grant Storr a lot of leeway, but I was surprised at being asked to consider Beckmann, clearly one of the most tough-minded, uningratiating, moody painters of all time, in terms of how likeable he was or wasn’t. (I was surprised, too, to hear Klee summarily deprived of his Swiss birthright, but that’s another matter.)

That Beckmann was cranky, self-involved, angry, and pretty well devoid of lightness was self-evident, but so, as Storr obviously agreed, was the fact that he belonged among the giants of