| Artist: | Beckmann, Max |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Night | |
| Date of Work: | 1919 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post WWI Germany | |
| Movement: | German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: it's night and the family has just sat down for dinner when all hell breaks loose. Dinner will have to wait as these nighttime intruders go about their business torturing the family. It is a scene of violence and violation on every level: a man is strung up on the left until his neck breaks, while another man twists his arm right out of the socket; a woman is tied up at the wrists and stripped bare, her legs straddled in close proximity to a phallic candle in a scene staged for sodomy; another man holds a young girl under his arm and opens a window with his other hand--he is about to toss her out the window and into the street. What we see in "The Night" is a family brutalized by unknown thugs (an eerie foreshadowing to what will shortly occur: Hitler's emerging secret police and the atrocities they committed in the night, with no one intervening to stop them). Beckmann is bravely pointing here to the violence and troubled times of Germany between two world wars. Style: in 1926 the movement would take its name: German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). Their style was marked by a razor-sharp, brutal hard-edge that denied the psychic tremors of earlier German Expressionism. That was pre-war; this is post-war. Bodies are painfully contorted and empty space is filled to a claustrophobic degree: "Oh, this infinite space! We must constantly fill up the foreground with junk so that we do not have to look in its frightening depth. What would we poor people do if we would not always come up with some idea, like country, love, art, and religion with which we can again and again cover up that dark black hole" (Beckmann). These crowded spaces with no way out speak of the German artist's horrific entrapment in time; there is no exit from history. The feeling shared among the New Objectivity artists (Beckmann, Grosz, and Otto Dix) was that there was no need to distort reality like the abstract avant-garde, because reality in Weimar Germany between the wars was already distorted enough. "I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting." When reality is already all-too-surreal, one does not need to fantasize or add an element of subjectivity; it is enough to just be objective. "My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting--to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence." There is a lack of order and a tilted perspective here to indicate a chaotic world out of control; it is the world come unhinged, quite literally. Context: German New Objectivity is a style that mirrors the tensions of the times with a biting truth and brutal candidness. It was a time of cruel reality, and they painted it that way, without sentiment or personal subjectivity. What they showed was a degraded, decadent society going downhill quickly. Following the loss of the war and the Allies' harsh punishment of Germany, inflation made German paper money worthless; bootlegging and corrupting exploiters took over the towns. The attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit was that of a cynical acceptance and factual statement of how rotten the times really were. They offered no false pictures of hope or belief in human kindness. This is not an art of dream logic but one of waking reality turned nightmare, and there was nothing "marvelous" about it. | ||
