Max Beckmann - Family Scene (Familienszene), from the series Faces (Gesichter); also called Beckmann Family (Familie Beckmann)

beckmann-.jpg

Max Beckmann (German, 1884–1950), Family Scene (Familienszene), from the series Faces (Gesichter); also called Beckmann Family (Familie Beckmann), 1918, drypoint, gift of Leslie and Johanna Garfield in honor of Barbara Mackey Kaerwer, 2002.99.4

 

Five months before World War I’s end, Beckmann produced this first portrait of his family in Berlin since 1914.  In response to the war and his increased scrutiny of older German art, drypoint’s tautness became ideal for increasingly complex, flattened, and overlapping compositions.  He rendered his mother-in-law, Minna Rompler Tube, his wife Minna, and ten-year-old son Peter close and withdrawn into themselves on the balcony of Frau Tube’s Pariserstraße apartment, and inserted his own close-eyed visage behind, remote yet comforted by their interlocking domesticity as a sickle moon and star flicker beyond.  The Beckmanns had separated upon his move to Frankfurt a.M. following his brief but horrifying service as a medical orderly.  At the time of this visit, all had long suffered from the war’s privations.  Frau Tube, who looms largest, had lost her only son in combat, and two daughters to disease during its course.

Barbara C. Buenger

Catalogue
Max Beckmann - Family Scene (Familienszene), from the series Faces (Gesichter); also called Beckmann Family (Familie Beckmann)