BECKMANN, Max, Featured Paintings in Detail

BECKMANN, Max
Featured Paintings in Detail

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

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

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

BECKMANN, Max
The Descent from the Cross (detail)
1917

BECKMANN, Max
Dancing Bar in Baden-Baden
1923
Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich

BECKMANN, Max
Dancing Bar in Baden-Baden (detail)
1923

Beckmann, Max
Galleria Umberto
1925
Oil on canvas, 113,0 x 50,0 cm
Collection R. N. Ketterer, Campione, Switzerland

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

BECKMANN, Max
Paris Society ( Gesellschaft Paris )
1931
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

BECKMANN, Max
Paris Society ( Gesellschaft Paris ) (detail)
1931
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

BECKMANN, Max
Departure Triptych
1932-33
Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x 99.7 cm, middle
panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm

BECKMANN, Max
Departure Triptych, Left Panel (detail)
1932-33
Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, side panels 215.3 x
99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm

BECKMANN, Max
Departure Triptych, Middle Panel (detail)
1932-33
99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm

BECKMANN, Max
Departure Triptych, Middle Panel (detail)
1932-33
99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm The
Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, Max
Departure Triptych, Right Panel (detail)
1932-33
99.7 cm, middle panel 215.3 x 115.2 cm The
Museum of Modern Art, New York

BECKMANN, Max
Temptation
1936-37
Oil on canvas, triptych, center panel 200 x 170
cm"; side panels each 215.5 x 100 cm

BECKMANN, Max
Temptation, Left Panel (detail)
1936-37

BECKMANN, Max
Temptation, Middle Panel (detail)
1936-37

BECKMANN, Max
Temptation, Right Panel (detail)
1936-37

BECKMANN, Max
Birds' Hell
1938
Oil on canvas, 120 x 160.5 cm .
St. Louis Art Museum

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

BECKMANN, Max
The Mill
1947
Oil on canvas, 54 1/4 x 50 3/8 in.
Portland Art Museum, Oregon

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

BECKMANN, Max
Perseus' Last Duty
1949
Cleveland Museum of Art

BECKMANN, Max
Perseus' Last Duty (detail)
1949
Cleveland Museum of Art

BECKMANN, Max, Featured Paintings in Detail
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BECKMANN, Max
Perseus' 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, Max
The 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, Max
The 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, Max
Dancing 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, Max
Paris 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, Max
Departure
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, Max
Temptation
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, Max
Galleria 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, Max
Birds' 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, Max
The 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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BECKMANN, Max, Featured Paintings in Detail