Self-Portrait

This is a painting in oil on canvas, and it is tall and narrow, about six and a half feet high. Max Beckmann painted himself close to life size, so the figure feels almost like a person standing in front of you. He wears a black tuxedo and stands on the staircase of a hotel lobby. The colors around him are bold: red, orange, green, blue and white. Two smaller figures appear in the background on the right, kept apart from him. The man himself looks out with dark-rimmed eyes, steady and serious.

Start with the eyes. They are ringed with dark shadow, and they gaze straight out at you. Then move down to the hands. They are large and hang limp against the black tuxedo, which is surprising in such a strong, aggressive picture. Finally, look at the whole scene around him. The curtains, flowers, staircase and banisters all seem to slide off toward the right, while Beckmann steps toward the left. The man and his surroundings pull in opposite directions, and that gives the painting its tension.

Max Beckmann was a German artist who painted more than eighty self-portraits. This one, from 1937, was perhaps the last painting he finished in Berlin. He and his wife fled to the Netherlands on July 20, 1937. That was just two days after Adolf Hitler gave a speech condemning modern art. It was also one day after the opening of the exhibition Degenerate Art, the Nazis' official attack on avant-garde art, meaning art that broke with tradition. Twenty-two of Beckmann's works were included in that show.

Beckmann had been one of the Weimar Republic's most honored artists, yet the Nazis vilified him. He left Germany just in time. In 1937 more than five hundred of his works were confiscated from public collections. Of all his self-portraits, the museum describes this as the most brilliantly colored and aggressive. Knowing what was happening around him, it is worth looking again at his face and his limp hands. See how a man in formal dress, in a bright hotel lobby, seems to stand firm while everything behind him slips away.