Max Beckmann (1884 - 1950)

Die Nacht [Night] marks Max Beckmann's most impressive appearance on the stage of the artistic avant-garde. This depiction of the brutal murder of a family also stands as a remarkable document of the human condition immediately after World War I. The drastic nature of the image is so overwhelming that the complex structure of the composition - with its acute angles and connecting diagonals - only becomes apparent on closer examination. Beckmann famously called his own style 'transcendental objectivity' - with its echoes of late medieval panel painting and details that reflect his own preoccupation with the formal language of the Cubists. ___