Max Beckmann

For Max Beckmann, self-portraiture was a vehicle, a search for truth through physical representation. The present exhibition has gathered a handful of Beckmann’s several hundred graphic works, most of which are self-portraits, unveiling the narrative of one artist’s life—the autobiography of a face—through the brutalities of the first half of the twentieth century.

In the earliest portrait, dating from 1904, the twenty-year-old artist is depicted with an earnestness and directness; to call it “innocent” would perhaps be going too far, but a certain glow in his eyes reveals a precarious wisdom. Fourteen years later, that confidence has been depleted by the horrors of the Great War, only to be replaced with a frown, startling in its severity. The evening suit of the earlier portrait has been supplanted by a grim worker’s uniform, and the artist’s left eye is arched paranoiacally at the edge of the left side of the lid, weary of the terrors that lie beyond the frame.

Some joviality returns in the images dating from the Weimar years, with a smattering of group and crowd scenes that call to mind Beckmann’s better-known paintings, which resonate so well with the faux schlock of fellow Neue Sachlichkeit–associated artists George Grosz and Otto Dix. Most impressive of these is Der Nachhauseweg (The Way Home), 1919, its veteran officers limping on crutches and leering with one-eyed faces, emerging from the interwar era’s joyous and decadent anarchy as bitter reminders of the recent past—and, as we now see, omens of the darkness that was soon to come.