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About Face: Max Beckmann in NY

By Peggy Roalf   Friday November 11, 2016

The seven self-portraits of Max Beckmann (Germany, 1884-1950 New York) currently on view at The Met present the horrors he experienced at the front during World War I—and a sense of foreboding that preoccupied him for the rest of his life. He wrote in a 1918 manifesto for his art, “We are on our way to very difficult times.”

In one of the highlights of the show, Self-Portrait With a Cigarette (above), painted five years later, epitomizes the brutality, the arrogance, the darkness he saw in the unfolding social and political changes as Weimar Republic moved toward Nazism. His scowling face, half in shadow, conveys his awareness of the menace about to be unleashed. 

His subsequent works, in which playful seaside scenes skewered Mussolini while acrobats toppling from a balloon in flight allude to the mismatch of social life and politics, were enormously popular in Germany. So much so that he became the poster child of Hitler’s denunciation of decadent modern art, with more than 500 works confiscated from public collections, including the self-portrait included here.

Don’t miss Max Beckmann in New York, which continues through February 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 100 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY Info Above: Self Portrait with Cigarette, 1923; MoMA, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn


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