1927, Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo -- Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge)
From the museum label: Beckmann debuted this now iconic self-portrait at the fifty-third exhibition of the Berlin Secession in 1928. For critics of the day, it upstaged the work of his contemporaries, like Otto Dix and Max Pechstein. “The effect is brutal,” wrote one reviewer, “but the work is surely in the spirit of the most recent art.” The perceived brutality referred less to the rawness of the subject’s direct gaze than to formal aspects of the painting’s execution: the thick application of pigment and the large planes of color, notably black. Half cast into deep shadow by an unseen light source, Beckmann’s face at close range resembles a mask. Known to frequent elite conservative circles, the artist easily dons the elegant attire and “mask” of the bourgeoisie, then launches his critique from within its own ranks. Despite his avowed distance from politics, over the next decade Beckmann increasingly used figurative allegories to comment on present-day circumstances.
1927, Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo -- Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge)
From the museum label: Beckmann debuted this now iconic self-portrait at the fifty-third exhibition of the Berlin Secession in 1928. For critics of the day, it upstaged the work of his contemporaries, like Otto Dix and Max Pechstein. “The effect is brutal,” wrote one reviewer, “but the work is surely in the spirit of the most recent art.” The perceived brutality referred less to the rawness of the subject’s direct gaze than to formal aspects of the painting’s execution: the thick application of pigment and the large planes of color, notably black. Half cast into deep shadow by an unseen light source, Beckmann’s face at close range resembles a mask. Known to frequent elite conservative circles, the artist easily dons the elegant attire and “mask” of the bourgeoisie, then launches his critique from within its own ranks. Despite his avowed distance from politics, over the next decade Beckmann increasingly used figurative allegories to comment on present-day circumstances.