Max Beckmann already presented a self-portrait of himself when he was 15 years old, long before he studied at the Academy, and from then on his work is perfused with a long and compact series of such works like hardly any other artist. Here we have the self-portrait of the 63-year-old after he had taken the plunge and moved to America in order to make a brand new start, within his period of emigration and in his life as a whole. How did he see himself, how does he show himself?

On 17 September 1947, Beckmann had come from Amsterdam via New York to Saint Louis to take up a teaching position and he already mentions his work on this self-portrait on 13 October. The painter obviously wanted to quickly establish himself in this foreign environment. We see a portrait of the upper torso and head and he is holding a cigarette. A scarf is wound around his neck and hangs over his blue jacket; it has the form and green colour of a snake and is thus reminiscent of self-portraits in which the painter had already portrayed himself with this animal. His being wrapped in the “snake scarf” matches the shadowy nature of the picture and the look in his half-closed, narrowed eyes. He shows no emotion whatsoever, appears sunken in deep thought, is distanced, enigmatic. A sense of reservation pervades the picture as a whole and is reinforced by the smoke and his act of smoking.

However, that is not everything, as the strong lines of the head in profile, the eyes, nose and closed mouth, as well as the upright position, made more austere by the narrow format, give expression to a determined nature despite the reservation. The figure being resented here has an ambiguous nature. The lifted hand demands respect for this man and his history, despite the cigarette; he is filled with an austere melancholy. That had nothing to do with where the emigrant was at that time.

However, one cannot say whether his hopes had been fulfilled in every sense on the first journey. A letter to Wolfgang Frommel in Amsterdam and entries in his diary that Quappi had kept concealed – apparently as she considered them to be inappropriate for the American friends and collectors – display a great sense of doubt right at the beginning concerning whether this new country really was the right one for him. “Have decided to leave this exciting little country as soon as possible. Why should I bore myself here” is what he wrote on 5 November 1947 in his original diary, and on 20 November he asked himself, “what am I doing here with the Indians, oh what grotesque laugh of a bourgeois jury am I part of, if it wasn’t so funny, I - M. B. – would almost be sad […] now I am locked in by life and well-prepared and dare no longer to burst open my cage.” And on 27 December, “So back to Holland. My only wish. You only realise what you had afterwards.” In a letter to Frommel from 16 December, Beckmann is more moderate in his words and yet he says that “things that interest you and me are [not] all too popular" and that “my longing or something similar for the old Europe” has not ceased. He also wrote that he thought a lot about Frommel and their discussions, “which won’t have been the last ones.” However, about his own misgivings he says, “despite it all, everyone is nice to me, I can even say they almost spoil me – and that says something. Perhaps I haven’t been here long enough to be able to make a correct judgement of everything.” (Max Beckmann, Briefe III, S. 197, all quotes ed. trans.)

The problematic nature of his circumstances are also made clear through Beckmann’s entry in his diary for 15 October 1947, two days after the painting is first mentioned: “I drag myself there sometimes so tired and bored and then once again it is not worth it and everything is a lie, the giant crickets chirp away and the sounds of the evening and false joy arrive from across faraway bridges.”