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Stuart Mackenzie
Large Expressionist Portrait, Follower of Max Beckmann, Glasgow School
1990

About the Item

A large Glasgow School Max Beckmann influenced oil on canvas portrait by Scottish artist Stuart Mackenzie. The painting is signed and dated to the rear of the canvas and the stretcher and there is a label with title 'Portrait Of An Unknown Artist' to the back of the canvas. There is also the original exhibition card included. A very strong and powerful painting of 'an unknown artist', could it be a self portrait? Mackenzie has achieved a remarkable play of light and shade that changes completely depending on the lighting. The character and the humour of the subject changes as well but there is humour in his face and a wry smile. His large hands are holding one of his own artistic endeavours. He is seated in a large and imposing chair in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackenzie has cleverly used highlights of white and red to give a movement and animation to the painting. A real statement piece that would be imposing in any interior and would grace any collection. Mackenzie has clearly been influenced by the powerful portraits of Max Beckmann from earlier in the century. Stuart Mackenzie was born in 1959. He studied at The Edinburgh College Of Art from 1979 to 1983 and then courtesy of The Richard Ford Award in Madrid, Spain. He was the first Artist in residence in Aberdeen Art Gallery in 1987, taught at Robert Gordon’s University from 1987/88, and has taught in The Glasgow School Of Art since 1988, where he currently teaches the Mlitt (Masters in Painting) and is Pathway Leader in Mlitt (Masters) drawing. He has been a Visiting Artist in many national/international Institutions and an external examiner for Leeds Metropolitan University. He is a member of The Academic Council at The Glasgow School Of Art, The Exhibitions Committee, and a Council Member of The Royal Scottish Academy. He is also the Convenor of The Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries Exhibition and sits on The Committee for The Richard Ford Award Madrid Scholarships (London). Stuart has shown nationally and internationally, and his work is held in many public and private collections and has been the recipient of many awards and prizes. Recent Exhibitions include: The Club at the Ivy at The London Book Fair, 2015; ‘Surface Value’, James Freeman Gallery, 2015; ‘Learning to Draw, Drawing to Learn’, The Fleming Collection (which he jointly curated with Professor Roger Wilson), 2013; Donghau University Shanghai, 2013; ‘Subtle Subversion’, a drawing conference, 2013; Scottish Drawing Royal Scottish Academy 2014; and The Annual Exhibition Royal Scottish Academy, 2014 and 2015. (With thanks to the Freeman Gallery) Mackenzie has, in this painting, clearly been inspired by the earlier portraiture of Beckmann. Max Beckmann dreamed up a world of actors, cabaret singers, heroes, and thugs, whose dramas unfold on city streets, at masquerades and carnivals, and in candlelit chambers. The artist himself is often part of the action, usually costumed, but identifiable by his enormous head and scowling face. At a time when many of his German contemporaries were experimenting with abstraction, Beckmann resolutely pursued the possibilities of figuration and narrative, peppering his paintings with fragments of myths, bible stories, and opaque allegories—often interspersed with scenes and figures from his life. After he received initial recognition for history paintings and portraits, with muted palettes, an impressionistic paint handling, and references to Old Masters like Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens, the course of Beckmann’s life and art shifted at the outbreak of World War I. He joined the medical corps, and at first he was energized by the turmoil of war, writing “my art can gorge itself here.” But the action soon ended for him after he had a nervous breakdown in 1915. Over the next decade, he captured the doomed Weimar Republic with acidic cynicism, creating jam-packed, riotously coloured canvases populated by a cast of characters enacting the chaos of postwar urban life. He also focused on etching and lithography in these years, producing several black-and-white print portfolios, including Hell (1918–19), which features scenes of a devastated Berlin. The city’s inhabitants torture one another, clamp their eyelids shut, and dance frantically. In the early 1930s, the National Socialist press began to attack Beckmann’s work, and in 1933, soon after Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, the artist was dismissed from his teaching position at Frankfurt’s Städel Art School, and his paintings at the Berlin National Gallery were removed from view. It was in this time of mounting terror and uncertainty that Beckmann began to paint the triptych Departure (1932–35), in which he has juxtaposed restraint and freedom, compression and openness, violence and refuge. Its outer panels are consumed by scenes of torture in a dimly lit theatre, while in the centre panel archaic figures appear on a boat in calm seas under a clear, bright sky. In 1937, on the day after many of his works were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition, Beckmann left for Amsterdam, where he lived during World War II. He remained active in exile, turning to mythic, parabolic images unmoored from a particular time or place. In 1947, he was able to immigrate to America, where he taught in St. Louis and New York. Sharing his own mantra with his students, he often told them, “work a lot…simplify…use lots of colour…make the painting more personal.”

Creator:

Stuart Mackenzie (1959, Scottish)

Creation Year:

1990

Dimensions:

Height: 49.61 in (126 cm)Width: 43.71 in (111 cm)Depth: 1.78 in (4.5 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Oil

Movement & Style:

Expressionist

Period:

Late 20th Century