Max Beckmann
self-portrait, 1936
Artist
Max Beckmann
Title
self-portrait
Year of creation
1936
Technique and dimensions
Plaster, tinted in the mass, 37.5 x 30 x 33 cm
Year of acquisition
1993
Max Beckmann created only eight sculptures, which were created between 1934 and 1936 and in the last year of his life in 1950. Like a number of modern painters, he also turned to three-dimensional design, but for him it did not have the significance that it has in the work of Degas, Matisse and Picasso or Kirchner, Schlemmer and Max Ernst.
Nevertheless, Beckmann achieved an independent form in this genre - albeit only relatively late in life. His small to less than life-sized figures, starting with the Man in the Dark, 1934, up to the Snake Charmer, 1950, are determined by a very voluminous, literally plastic mass and integrated into a very gestural, sometimes acrobatically extended design. They are embodiments of symbolic states that are placed in the room like expressively charged signs of respect. Interestingly, her style is more flowing than is the case in the comparable body treatment of his paintings, in which the volume is edged out harder from the background of the picture. References to the sculpture of Rodin, Degas and Matisse emerge.
The self-portrait occupies a certain special position in this small sculptural oeuvre because, in contrast to the other figures and despite a head formed in 1950, it is the only work “based on a model” and represents the only real portrait. This formation of one's own self, created in Berlin in 1936, may be related to the special circumstances of the year in which it was created, which gave Beckmann the feeling that this self-questioning, this testing of one's own strengths and thus also the reflection of this extremely tense time in National Socialist Germany in a physically comprehensive, having to clarify holistically present reality.
The portrait, as Andreas Franzke characterized this massive, attentive head in 1984, “impresses with its extraordinarily collected expression, which, against the background of a difficult time, does not show resignation, but rather manifests a proud will to assert itself. What is impressive is how Beckmann develops the skull entirely from the compact mass. The sturdy base of the neck, whose striking design acts as a prelude to the angular head, which is formed in large sections, ensures absolute stability."
How important this self-portrait was to Max Beckmann is shown by the fact that he included the sculpture in 1937 took exile to Holland. And in 1948, when he moved to the USA, the head was one of the works that accompanied him. Afterwards it was owned by his widow, Quappi Beckmann. In the 1950s, six bronze casts were made using this plaster.
Fritz Jacobi
