Nicholas Serota went the extra mile, including by Greyhound bus across the Midwest, to borrow ten triptychs by Max Beckmann for an extraordinary loan show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1980, its former director recalls in a new book about the graphic design of the East End institution. When the Whitechapel and co-organiser, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, first wrote to the owners, “we got nine letters of refusal,” Serota told the book’s author Christopher Wilson. Instead of throwing in the Beckmann towel, Serota flew to the US on a charm offensive to persuade institutions, collectors and Max Beckmann’s widow, Mathilde, to reconsider, if he could get all the others to say “yes”. They all thought he wouldn’t be able to do it. In the end Serota got nine out of ten. The tenth—The Argonauts—was the one that belonged to Mathilde Beckmann. Despite Serota’s best efforts, she was not for lending. It was “entirely due to superstition”, Serota recalls. “She had this idea that it was [Beckmann’s] last painting, that he’d walked out into Central Park, having just finished it, and he died there; and if the painting left the apartment where it had been since he died in 1950, then something would happen to her.” Two decades later, Serota got The Argonauts to London, borrowing it from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, for Tate Modern’s Beckmann blockbuster in 2003. Richard Hollis, Designs for the Whitechapel by Christopher Wilson is due to published in September by Hyphen Press.
