Max Beckmann

The Night, 1918-19

Oil on canvas 133 x154cm

Centre Pompidou, Paris
3rd November 2002

I saw the Max Beckmann retrospective twice, in Paris and then again in London at Tate Modern. Interesting that they had different approaches to the exhibition and the contextual background for the paintings was much stronger in Paris. They included archive film footage from the front of World War I (Trouvay: A Gas Attack) and explained that Beckmann like other Neue Sachlichkeit artists, had enlisted believing that war could cleanse society.

The handout ascertained that Beckmann considered expressionism was aloof from the social reality of it’s time and that the New Objectivity was too close to journalism. Beckmann is consequently a bit of a ‘loner, drawing from history and from his intimate reveries a meaning that could illuminate human destiny’[1].

This work was painted after his rejection of military service and his first hand experience of the madness of war. I am not sure I find it melancholic, perhaps in the sense that as far as man’s inhumanity to man goes, nothing has changed.

The painting depicts a complex scene of torture in what looks like an attic room with a black night seen through the window. It is full of grisly detail; on the left, a man is hung by one of the torturers, and his arm twisted by another. A woman, perhaps the man's wife, is bound to a pillar. On the right, a young girl (daughter?) clings to another who is clutching her leg as she peers at her parents' suffering. There is another woman in the background, partially hidden by the main protagonists. There is a howling dog under the table. None of the gazes are directed at the viewer, the dog howls out of the left side of the canvas and is balanced by a torturer keeping watch out of the right side of the canvas. All the others are within the space. In the foreground is a gramophone, presumably to drown out the screams of the victims and two candles, one lit (perhaps in a glimmer of hope) the other snuffed out.

The grisly scene is matched by his composition and brushwork. All the figures and objects in the room have spiky black outlines and seem almost fractured to fit into the tight space. Strange things are happening spatially, the woman is in the foreground of the room, yet her wrists are tied to a stanchion at the back of the room. There are flashes of colour and these seem to be the only aspect that is in balance in the painting.

[1] Unattributed handout for the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Brian Holmes credited as translator

©blackdog 2009