Self-Portrait
Max Beckmann
MAX BECKMANN, 1937. OIL ON CANVAS.
Of all the artists despised by the Nazi Party in 1930s, Max Beckmann was amongst the most reviled. After the First World War, a boom of intellectualism occurred in Germany, with Berlin as its centre point, and the city became a fertile breeding ground for a new avant-garde that questioned the order of things before. Artists, writers, dancers, performers, musicians, and designers contributed to a culture of the Weimar Republic that was free, wild, and radical at every stage. As Hitler rose to power, he saw these movements as being in direct opposition to his philosophies, decrying it as degenerate art. Book burnings of works of Jewish intellectuals and modernist writers occurred, and the seizing of experimental, expressive, and modern work took place in galleries across the country. Beckmann became a figure head of all that Hitler saw as wrong with the creative culture of the nation, and the artist had to flee the country. This self portrait was his last painted in his home country, and it serves as a defiant declaration of his brilliance, in both skill and composition. He stand atop a staircase, elegantly dressed in a tuxedo, his eyes glancing angrily out of frame while the background behind him descends into turmoil.