| Artist: | Beckmann, Max |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Dream | |
| Date of Work: | 1921 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post WWI Germany | |
| Movement: | German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: Beckmann calls it "The Dream," but it is a dream you can't wake up from--Germany's reality between the two wars. The painting's original title was "The Madhouse," and that suits it well: we see crazy characters, mutilated and blind, or drunk on their asses and turning uselessly around in circles, like a dog trying to catch its tail. One man climbs a ladder with his bandaged stumps for hands, but it's no use; he'll only hit his head on the low ceiling. There is no escape, no exit, from this enclosed, claustrophobic room; this is a picture of entrapment. At center a little girl with Beckmann's own features sits on a suitcase as if she is waiting to depart; she scowls out at her surroundings, while the Punch and Judy doll in her lap claps its hands as if entertained by the show humanity is putting on here. No one is going anywhere; the scene is a crowded image of the void and meaninglessness of it all. 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. | ||
