beckmann, max, featured paintings in detail

BECKMANN, Max

Featured Paintings in Detail

BECKMANN, MaxThe Night (Die Nacht)1918-19Oil on canvas, 133 x 154 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

BECKMANN, MaxThe Night (Die Nacht) (detail)1918-19Oil on canvas, 133 x 154 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

BECKMANN, MaxThe Descent from the Cross1917Oil on canvas, 151.2 x 128.9 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxThe Descent from the Cross (detail)1917Oil on canvas, 151.2 x 128.9 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDancing Bar in Baden-Baden1923Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 65.5 cm Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

BECKMANN, MaxDancing Bar in Baden-Baden (detail)1923Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 65.5 cm Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

Beckmann, MaxGalleria Umberto1925Oil on canvas, 113,0 x 50,0 cm Collection R. N. Ketterer, Campione, Switzerland

Beckmann, MaxGalleria Umberto (detail)1925Oil on canvas, 113,0 x 50,0 cm Collection R. N. Ketterer, Campione, Switzerland

BECKMANN, MaxParis Society ( Gesellschaft Paris )1931 Oil on canvas, 109.2 x 175.6 cm The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

BECKMANN, MaxParis Society ( Gesellschaft Paris ) (detail)1931 Oil on canvas, 109.2 x 175.6 cm The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture Triptych 1932-33Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cmThe Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture Triptych, Left Panel (detail)1932-33Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cmThe Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture Triptych, Left Panel (detail) 1932-33Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cmThe Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture Triptych, Middle Panel (detail)1932-33Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cmThe Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture Triptych, Middle Panel (detail)1932-33Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture Triptych, Right Panel (detail)1932-33Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, MaxTemptation1936-37Oil on canvas, triptych, center panel 200 x 170 cm"; side panels each 215.5 x 100 cm Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

BECKMANN, MaxTemptation, Left Panel (detail)1936-37Oil on canvas, triptych, center panel 200 x 170 cm"; side panels each 215.5 x 100 cm Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

BECKMANN, MaxTemptation, Middle Panel (detail)1936-37Oil on canvas, triptych, center panel 200 x 170 cm"; side panels each 215.5 x 100 cm Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

BECKMANN, MaxTemptation, Right Panel (detail)1936-37Oil on canvas, triptych, center panel 200 x 170 cm"; side panels each 215.5 x 100 cm Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

BECKMANN, MaxBirds' Hell1938Oil on canvas, 120 x 160.5 cm .St. Louis Art Museum

BECKMANN, MaxBirds' Hell (detail)1938Oil on canvas, 120 x 160.5 cm St. Louis Art Museum

BECKMANN, MaxThe Mill1947Oil on canvas, 54 1/4 x 50 3/8 in.Portland Art Museum, Oregon

BECKMANN, MaxThe Mill (detail)1947Oil on canvas, 54 1/4 x 50 3/8 in.Portland Art Museum, Oregon

BECKMANN, MaxPerseus' Last Duty 1949Oil on canvas, 89.40 x 142.00 cm Cleveland Museum of Art

BECKMANN, MaxPerseus' Last Duty (detail)1949Oil on canvas, 89.40 x 142.00 cm Cleveland Museum of Art

BECKMANN, Max, Featured Paintings in Detail

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BECKMANN, MaxPerseus' Last Duty

Beckmann painted Perseus’ Last Duty in New York the year before his death. The powerful forms and shocking, enigmatic subject are typical of his finest works, which are often impossible to interpret in any straightforward, conventional manner.

Beckmann may have known earlier representations of Perseus slaying Medusa, a subject that appears in ancient Roman murals at Pompeii and in Renaissance sculptures. In stark contrast to these works, Beckmann’s interpretation is considerably more violent. Rather than slaying a single figure, Perseus stands in a pool of blood surrounded by mass carnage.

He swings an enormous sword that reaches beyond the picture frame and into our own space.

Dead bodies float in the blood; others lie on the stairs in the upper left. The two figures behind the decapitated woman seem lined up for execution, while four half-naked, weeping women appear in the mirror in the upper right.

The recurring circular forms, such as the shape of the mirror and the pool of blood, may allude to an unending cycle of cruelty and violence. A fierce animal with a blood-spattered face witnesses the executions, perhaps a reference to Cerberus, the three-headed dog in classical mythology that guards the entrance to the underworld and prevents the condemned from escaping. This hybrid beast also incorporates elements of the Sphinx, a demonic part-human, part-animal creature. When approached, the Sphinx asks a riddle, then kills and devours

anyone who fails to answer correctly.

According to etymologists, the name Perseus derives from the Greek verb for “to waste, ravage, sack, or destroy.” Although Beckmann’s painting evokes references to classical mythology, this grisly scene clearly belongs to the modern world and suggests a personal dream or nightmare. Having been traumatized as a medical orderly during World War I, and

after barely surviving yet another world war, Beckmann was confronted in the postwar years with horrors of the Cold War and fears of nuclear annihilation.

Beckmann’s bitter social critique emerges in this horrifying image of Perseus, the great warrior, ironically presented wearing a dress and nylon stockings, transforming the Greek warrior into a debauched anti-hero, a counter-myth to standard histories that glamorize military victories, war, and conquest. While Beckmann’s precise intentions are unknown, the

painting suggests a commentary on the human propensity toward conflict, violence, and cruelty that erupted with unprecedented furor in the modern age.

BECKMANN, MaxThe Night (Die Nacht)

Four men (three torturers and one tortured) and four women (one tortured and three witnesses) are crowded in an improvised torture chamber. The three torturers are represented in two combinations – both are typical for the situation of domination: two men prevail over the one, and a man prevails over a woman.

In the witnessing/observing women Beckmann depicts three psychological postures of reacting on torture – horror, compassion, and withdrawal. He personifies these paradigmatic feelings through the female characters for the purpose of emphasizing, it seems, the passivity of these feelings, people’s inability to feel resentment and indignation toward torture

to the degree of taking steps against it. In other words, we are all psychologically feminized in the presence of torture; a primordial fear transforms our reactions into a mute emotional response to the world. Torture has the same effect on us as Freudian primal scene on a child.

The three torturers are positioned against five people (the two tortured and the three witnesses) – the majority is, obviously, not on the torturers’ side! If the three witnesses could have united with the potential victims they would have been able to overrun the predators. But the witnesses retreat into an introverted, internal reactions connected to the posture

of observation rather than action, and that’s how torturers triumphantly prevail.

This is surely one of the most gruesome pictures ever painted. Other artists, usually motivated by the higher purposes of patriotism or pacifism, have shown the disasters of war, suppression, and martyrdom; torture and pain are often represented as the just deserts of sinners tumbling into hell, and the roasting and beheading of saints are depicted to serve

the greater glory of God. But Beckmann sees no purpose in the suffering he shows; there is no glory for anybody, no compensation, no gloating over justice accomplished-only enseless pain, and cruelty for its own sake. Beckmann blames human nature as such, and there seems to be no physical escape from this overwhelming self-accusation. Victims

and aggressors alike are cornered. There is no exit.

BECKMANN, MaxThe Descent from the Cross

Max Beckmann's Kreuzabnahme (Descent from the cross) presents an unflinching look at bodily suffering—a timely topic in the midst of a seemingly never-ending war. Multiple perspectives are combined to focus the eye on Jesus's oversize corpse, his pale flesh covered in bruises and sores, with coagulated blood pooling around the gaping black

holes of the stigmata. His emaciated arms stretch across the picture and in their rigor mortis still mirror the shape of the cross. Beckmann thinly and precisely applied paint in cold, restrained hues, in contrast to his exuberant brushwork for his prewar canvases.

Beckmann possibly made this painting to answer a challenge posed by curator Gustav Hartmann to create a modern work as powerful as medieval German art, which they had viewed together in Frankfurt (along with works by Italian, Flemish, and German Old Masters that significantly influenced Beckmann's style). Beckmann, after spending a few

years making only prints, had recently returned to painting.

BECKMANN, MaxDancing Bar in Baden-Baden

The colors are iridescent like an oil film on a puddle, subtly indicating Beckmann's social criticism of the "upper crust." Changeable hues form an almost poisonous harmony evocative of the life-style of those years. The paillettes on the women's dresses are typical of the early twenties, as are the flawlessly white shirts that give their

shady escorts the appearance of high respectability.

The people depicted here are the profiteers riding the crest of the economic upheaval in Germany. Something is rotten in this state, but the painter's impartial eye sees beauty even in decomposition. The soap bubble of a phony boom can be beautifully tinted before it bursts.

BECKMANN, MaxParis Society ( Gesellschaft Paris )

Paris Society is Max Beckmann’s portrait of émigrés, aristocrats, businessmen, and intellectuals engaged in disjointed festivity on the eve of the Third Reich. Beckmann painted the work on an invitation from the German embassy in Paris. By 1931, when he completed it, accusations and slander against the freethinking artist had begun to mount in Germany,

and the somber character of Paris Society seems to reflect his sense of foreboding. Beckmann spent much of his time in Paris, although financial hardship stemming from his persecution led him to give up his studio there one year later. He eventually emigrated to Amsterdam and then to the U.S.

Paris Society is rife with ambiguities. The event depicted is a black-tie party, although the socialites gathered there seem strangely depressed. Some of the figures in the composition were identified by the artist’s widow, Mathilde Beckmann. They include the central figure, Beckmann’s friend Prince Karl Anton Rohan; the Frankfurt banker Albert

Hahn, at the far right; the music historian Paul Hirsch, seated at the left; the German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch, at the lower right, with his head in his hands; and possibly Paul Poiret, the French couturier, standing at the left. But why they are together in this scene and what their peculiar postures denote remain a matter of speculation.

BECKMANN, MaxDeparture

Beckmann began painting Departure just before the Nazis came to power, and completed the work shortly after they deposed him from his teaching post in Frankfurt. Despite asserting in lectures that he was apolitical, this work reflects Beckmann's growing anxiety in face of the cruelty fostered by the rise of the Nazis. His preference for large-scale painting evolved during the 1920s and resulted in this, his first triptych. Beckmann utilized the expanded format of the divided canvas to emphasize specific moments within a larger narrative and to strengthen the impact of his tale of perseverance. Although the tripartite format originated centuries earlier during the medieval period for the purpose

Christian devotional painting, Beckmann found that it was the ideal layout for his modern form of personal and social allegorical painting.

The dimly lit right panel of the triptych portrays a woman bound to an upside-down man, searching in vain for a path out of her current plight, thwarted by a drummer in front of her and a sinister bellhop at her rear. In the left panel, Beckmann represented several figures in a torture chamber with their hands bound, forced to submit to unspeakable acts

of violence. The outer panels convey Beckmann's vision of the contemporary violence and brutality inflicted by people on their fellow human beings. In contrast to the dark vision of humanity in the flanking images, the central panel portrays the possibility of salvation for all. Four adult figures and one child occupy a rough wooden boat floating in an azure sea. A crowned figure with his back turned, the fisher king, grasps a net of fish and confers a blessing on the scene, while an ominous hooded man at the oars holds a fish - both allude to "the mystery of the world." On the other side of the boat, a woman, the Queen, clutches a small child facing the viewer, while the man sitting next to her, the King, is largely obscured. Beckmann described the central family to a friend by stating, "The King and Queen have freed themselves... The Queen carries the greatest treasure -

Freedom - as her child in her lap. Freedom is the one thing that matters - it is the departure, the new start." Beckmann traced an allegorical path through the darkness and suffering of daily life toward the light and freedom of redemption. He distilled the contemporary cultural climate of Europe into a transcendent message of hope, regardless of

the era's tribulations. After this work, Beckmann completed nine more triptychs during the remainder of his career, all in a similarly jewel-toned palette and in a large scale suited to their grand, symbolic nature.

BECKMANN, MaxTemptation

Temptation (often referred to as The Temptation of Saint Anthony), the second of Beckman's nine triptychs, was painted in Berlin before the artist went into exile. Full of foreboding about the bellicose Nazi politics, Beckmann retreated into a world of personal ideology. He explored the hidden forces deep in the human soul that cause the upheavals erupting at the surface of our everyday existence. His triptychs are certainly splendid storytelling,

but they have the ambivalence of dreams. They do not illustrate existing fables.

The very center of Temptation contains the germ cell of the unfolding drama. A bluish black iron idol with two heads embraces itself Beckmann may refer here to the ancient Diana of Ephesus, or to the Chaldean myth that Oannes taught concerning the origin of mankind: "Men had one body, but two heads_the one of a man, the other of a woman. They were,

in their several organs, both male and female." This tale persisted throughout the antique world. Plato tells us that these bisexual beings were so contented and blissful that the gods became envious and split them apart with a sharp sword; since then the two sexes, with burning passion, crave reunification to heal their wounds. Sigmund Freud developed

the psychological validity of this idea that each psyche contains components of both sexes. Beckmann, in his diary, declares: "The whole thing is an enormous self-mirroring, established so we can enjoy always anew our Atman, the Self And we have to admit that this trick-to partition ourselves into male and female-is really a fabulous, almost unending

stimulus to drag us around by a tight rein."

Beckmann, MaxGalleria Umberto

We know that Mussolini was killed on April 28, 1945, by Italian partisans, and subsequently hung by his feet in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. This scene was painted by Beckmann twenty years before Mussolini's death!

Erhard Gopel, an art critic who often visited Beckmann in wartime Amsterdam, gives the following account: "When, in 1925, he promenaded through the Galleria Umberto in Naples, he saw the flood of fascism rising, he saw carabinieri saving drowning people and a body hung upside down by ropes. He saw this in broad daylight. When Mussolini's fall was reported, he fetched the painting from the closet and showed it in his studio. He considered it a vision even before he knew that he had also foreseen the manner of the dictator's end_hanging

head down."

Galleria Umberto contains many odd features, the strangest of which is the crystal ball hanging from the glass ceiling. Did Beckmann have clairvoyance in mind when he invented this translucent globe? Consciously, he probably wanted only to satirize the Italy of 1925. The fascists' murder of Matteotti was widely interpreted as a storm signal just then, and

Beckmann feared that gay vacationland Italy' symbolized by the mandolin, the bather, and the tootling blonde, might be swamped by political repression. An Italian flag is drowning already in the foreground.

BECKMANN, MaxBirds' Hell

Birds' Hell is an allegory of Nazi Germany. It is a direct attack on the cruelty and conformity that the National Socialist seizure of power brought to Beckmann's homeland.

Since even obvious symbols are open to various interpretations, the puzzling language of symbolism itself can be more easily read with the aid of some special historical knowledge: The Nazis enjoyed stretching their right arms into the air simultaneously, a gesture known as the Hitlergruss that was usually accompanied by raucous shouting. Rich party officials, who strutted around in well-tailored uniforms, were called Goldfasanen (gold pheasants) by the skeptical populace. It is also useful to remember the prevalence in

Nazi Germany of the incessant din of loudspeakers; these are depicted in the upper right of the painting. The aggressive Prussian eagle was still a vivid memory, and the Third Reich adopted that heraldic bird for some of its own emblems. The golden coins that the eagle is hoarding

symbolize monopolistic capitalism which, under the pretext of patriotism, came to the aid of Hitler and his supporters. Even the clergy who joined forces with the Nazis-especially the Deutsche Christen of Reichstischof Muller-are symbolized by the blackfrocked, bespectacled bird just below the loudspeaker funnels. All these forces are united in one vast,

orgiastic demonstration, while in the foreground, unnoticed by the excited crowd, a slim, shackled, Kafkaesque intellectual is being carved up.

But what about the enigmatic female figure in the center of the composition? This riddle could fairly easily be solved by viewers during the late thirties. She represents the all-pervasive, phony myth used by the National Socialists to gloss over their crude power game and their materialism: their Blut und Boden philosophy, or blood-and-soil preachments. Mother Earth, with multiple breasts and Hitler salute, pops out of the Nazi egg like a barbaric jackin-the-box. A perverted mother goddess, Germania bares her teeth in an aggressive

grin. Fertility becomes the official duty of a warrior race. Aryan maidens lined up behind the goddess are waiting for the Nazi studs.

On the right, a newspaper is lying on the floor. It seems that the slender, perhaps Jewish, man was just reading about the Nazi horrors when, suddenly, the contents of the Zeitung came to life for him. In the left foreground, a table displays some of the good things that people enjoyed before the Hitler cohorts invaded this room: grapes, a book, and the candle

of intellectual endeavor.

BECKMANN, MaxThe Mill

The liberation of Holland in May 1945 was not immediately a personal liberation for Beckmann. All through the war years he was in danger of being "discovered" by the Nazi occupying forces; now he was endangered by "superpatriotic Dutchmen" who wanted to ship all Germans back to their defeated fatherland.

Of course he was grateful that Holland had given him asylum since 1937, but he was eager to move about more freely. Since he could not obtain a passport or visa, he made bicycle trips around Amsterdam.

From June 19 to July 23, 1946, as a result of this trip, he painted Windmill. With its lush, green fields and pine trees, its enormous clouds and idyllic windmills, the canvas is a declaration of love for Holland. And yet, after August 31, this lovely picture was suddenly perverted into a nightmare, and the Dutch windmill was re-created as a torture instrument.

The redheaded, half-clad, helpless girl has an extraordinary, touching beauty. Her arms cross those of the standing man and together they parallel the windmill's sails which complete the unified pattern. It is a composition of cross-purposes, whose tyrannically imposed order, for each individual, amounts to senseless slavery. The windmill in this painting, seems to

have acquired the shadowy face of a demon.

What is the explanation for this cruel deterioration of that bucolic Dutch motif, the windmill? Beckmann's memories of the Nazi era may have welled to the surface. His fight for a "non-enemy declaration," his bad health in consequence of the war years' deprivations, and his immobility and helplessness in the coils of bureaucratic red tape had a disastrous effect on

his nerves. And yet, these petty hindrances, even though they amounted to personal torture for the old freedom fighter, cannot elucidate the deeper contents of the artist's soul.

BECKMANN, Max

After enduring a "great injury to his soul" during World War I, Max Beckmann channeled his experience of modern life into expressive images that haunt the viewer with their intensity of

emotion and symbolism.

Despite his early leanings toward academicism and Expressionism, he became one of the main artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement and created scathing

visual critiques of the tumultuous interwar period. In later works, Beckmann strove toward open-ended stories that juxtaposed scenes from reality, dreams, myths, and fables.

In 1933, the Nazi government called Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik" and in 1937 the government confiscated more than 500 of his works from German museums, putting several on display in the

notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. The day after Hitler's radio speech about degenerate art in 1937, Beckmann left Germany with his second wife, Quappi, for The Netherlands.

Throughout his career, he firmly opposed the turn toward abstract art and maintained his desire to "get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting." Beckmann's prowess at

subtly layering figures and signs, as well as color and shadow, allowed him to successfully translate his reality into mesmerizing narrative paintings throughout his prolific career.

beckmann, max, featured paintings in detail

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