Beckmann

How far should we trust an artist's own statements about his work? Max Beckmann, a leading Expressionist painter who had been dismissed as `decadent' in Germany during the 1930s, emigrated to Holland in 1937 and died in America in 1950. When he wrote about his work, particularly after 1937, he stressed the spiritual rôle of the artist and his position as solitary genius, unconcerned with public events; and the triptych Temptation, finished in 1937, can be seen as consistent with this view. But an examination of his earlier work, Departure, finished in 1933, certainly seems to show that it was intended as a comment on the political and cultural situation in Germany at the time, however hard Beckmann tried to reinterpret it later.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.