| Artist: | Beckmann, Max |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Self-Portrait in a Tuxedo | |
| Date of Work: | 1927 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post WWI Germany | |
| Movement: | German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: self-portrait showing Beckmann as a tough guy, not a trembling, overly sensitive German Expressionist, but the more masked, hard-to-penetrate psyche of the Neue Sachlichkeit artist, who keeps his inner self hidden behind a tuxedo. Beckmann creates an image that blocks out any view into depth, whether it be spatial depth or the depths of the psyche. The self remains a mystery, thus. The New Objectivity artists are not interested in subjectivity; instead, they try to cover up what they fear might be the truth of things: that there is nothing there . . . the self as a void . . . a dark black hole. "The self is the great veiled mystery of the world," Beckmann tells us, "What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art. And then I awoke and yet continued to dream . . ." 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. Beckmann uses strong dark/light contrasts to form this iconic image, and he shadows the face as if it were masked. Typical of his art, he cuts off any view into deep space: "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). 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." 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. | ||
