Blind Man's Bluff (thing)

Max Beckmann’s Blind Man’s Bluff, for me, has been a serious challenge of comprehension. My inexperience with decoding expressionist art-combined with the scales of confusion, color, and clutter found in this piece-made my time spent with the tryptch frustrating to say the least. Knowledge of Beckmann’s intended meanings with Bluff would not have, in my mind, assisted me in formulating my own theories about the piece, or released the tensions presented by it. I do not know what emotions or stories or descriptive adjectives Beckmann intended to inspire with this trio, but I do know what these ideas are that I have taken from the painting myself.

The most concrete ideas come first for me, so initially I’d like to present my observation notes:

• The man is experiencing sensations other than sight-but the tryptch is purely visual.
• We’re experiencing what The Blind Man can’t, and he is doing the reverse.
• On the left panel The Woman seems caught in prayer-or psychic connection to the Blind Man-commanding/reading his senses? Sharing/receiving secrets about his experiences.
• Stained glass background apparent.
• I’m not seeing the central panel as an actual happening-instead is the imagined environment of The Blind Man’s senses. A fantasy of rambunctious gods and monsters.
• Well dressed people on the side panels/a party?/pagans in center. The mystical sights/sounds of the world come from the pagans.

As I see it, Blind Man’s Bluff presents to us two worlds, the physical world of a party involving a blindfolded man, and the world imagined by The Blind Man as he is confronted with various sensual stimuli. The party universe is shared by the wing panels of the work, where The Blind Man and Praying Woman can be found amid talkative party goers. The imaginary world of the Blind Man’s senses occupies the central panel, and the confusion of the piece as a whole can be pinpointed to this panel’s dominance over the others and its inherent dream or fantasy-like imagery.

In the sense-fantasy world of the central panel, The Blind Man’s imagination runs wild. The music that he hears, the sensations of the fur he rubs, the heat and busy of the party environment are all here translated by The Blind Man’s imagination as the play of lazy gods. Fitting to this hallucination is the dream-like quality of the bold colors and contorted composition of the figures. The heightened nature of physical sensations when not accompanied by visual stimuli dictate these vivid and chaotic color schemes, filling in visual information where only other sense-forms are present. The ambient chatter of The Blind Man’s physical environment could also be seen in the conversant and crowded arrangement of the Gods Figures, where no single god or idea takes center stage. The central panel shows us the secret fantasies of thought-perhaps unconsious-as The Blind Man enjoys his presented stimulator(and anticipates the next).

The stimulators are presented to The Blind Man by figures in the party environment in a very game-like setting. The Praying Woman kneeling quietly in the left panel seems the least involved in the excitement of "The Game", and her lack of participation is shown in her avoidance of the two male figures crowding about her as if seeking secrets. This arrangement of figures, The Praying Woman and the two Secret-Searching Men, is the most mysterious part of the piece. Can The Woman divine insights into The Blind Man’s mind? Do the two Secret-Seekers pursue this information? Does this interplay hold any significance to The Game? We can only imagine.

Beckmann’s uses of color and cluttered, distorted images confront the viewer with a challenging visual puzzle. The primary reactions of confusion and unease are presented initially by the juxtapositions of these factors(also the tripartite nature of the tryptch format), and are mirrored by the complexity of the story constructions of the viewer. The dreamy air of colorful, vibrant forms set off by bold black lines around pseudo-geometric shapes certainly dictates a specific kind of interpretation on the part of the observer, while one simple fact remains: The Blind man hears, feels, smells and tastes where the observer only can see. Our interpretations are fundamentally different than his, and our understanding of this piece will always be incomplete.