Herbert Beck - serious and very personal

Created: 12/25/2021, 6:00 PM

The exhibition that gallery owner Michael Beck curated with works by his famous father Herbert Beck from 1956 to 2004 tells of happiness at Tegernsee.

The artist's painting table looks as if Herbert Beck has only just got up.

© Michael Dannenmann

The painter Herbert Beck found his paradise on Tegernsee.

Now his son Michael Beck is showing an anniversary show about his father in his gallery - a very personal look and also a different perspective on the artist's work.

Tegernsee

- It has been almost 102 years since Herbert Beck was born in Leipzig.

Actually, son Michael Beck wanted to honor the 100th birthday of his famous father with a special exhibition, but it had to be postponed again and again due to Corona.

Until now: Michael Beck, who also chairs the board of the Tegernsee Gulbransson Society, is currently showing a very personal and unusually serious artist Herbert Beck under the title “And it became my luck” in his renowned Beck & Eggeling gallery in Düsseldorf.

Whether landscapes, harlequins or the “Faces of the World”: Michael Beck gives his father's paintings plenty of room to breathe when they are hanging.

“They are expressive and colorful, they need their space.” Just like the artist himself once did.

In 1947, the trained goldsmith, who had played in the music corps in Russia for four years and in banned jazz bands during the Nazi era, fled the confines of Leipzig - that of the Soviet occupation and that of his father, who saw the only son as the heir to his goldsmiths.

Herbert Beck's relationship with his disappointed father suffered as a result.

And yet he bought him a house.

In Michael-Dengg-Weg, in Tegernsee, where the Becks had previously been on vacation.

Herbert Beck and his wife Gisela stayed there for the first few years as landlords of guest rooms.

Beck played the accordion for the GIs in the seven-dachshund bar in the former police station (now a Palazzo), named after the landlady's dogs.

He experienced the Tegernsee as paradise.

Studio with a panoramic view of the Tegernsee

This is reflected in the anniversary exhibition: Michael Beck has attached a monochrome photo wallpaper to one wall with the panoramic view from his father's studio of the Tegernsee and the mountains. In front of it his easel and his painting table with the used brushes, pastels and watercolors as well as the painting stool - as if the artist, who died on December 28, 2010, had just got up from painting with Bach or jazz in his ear. "I used to play camel rides on the stool as a child," remembers Michael Beck, who was born in 1963 and had a close relationship with his father.

As a painter, Herbert Beck was mainly self-taught.

While his pictures became lighter and more colorful - after the war they were still very dark, says the son - Herbert Beck found increasing recognition in the art scene.

In 1952 he met the famous expressionist Emil Nolde - a groundbreaking encounter.

Beck became known for unusually large-format watercolors and watercolor-like oil paintings.

“He thinned the oil paint with turpentine and let it run.” After a serious turpentine poisoning through decades of work with the solvent, on which he labored for about a year, he left oil painting in 1984 for good.

Herbert Beck is more serious than many realize

When you talk about Herbert Beck, you usually mean intensely colored paintings. But as in his carnival scenes, in which serious faces emerge from behind the masks, there is also more seriousness in Herbert Beck's work than many initially realize. "My father was often disappointed that his serious subjects were not seen," says son Michael Beck. “He dealt a lot with the questions of humanity and world problems.” As a curator, he also directs the gaze in the anniversary show to this facet and the oil paintings. For example with the "mighty one" with the globe in his lap. Or with the “self-portrait with a mushroom cloud”, which deliberately breaks the idyllic Tegernsee panorama. "The audience, including painters whom we represent, is absolutely delighted," reports Michael Beck. "The quality is recognized - I am very pleased."

Unfortunately, Michael Beck cannot show the show at Tegernsee.

“We don't have the space, and in the Gulbransson Museum we have already planned the next four years.” On January 29, 2022, Herbert Beck's 102nd birthday, the show in Düsseldorf ends with a finissage.

Some impressions can be seen on beck-eggeling.de.

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