Max Beckmann - The Night (1918)
- Title: The Night (Die Nacht)
- Artist: Max Beckmann (1884-1950)
- Date: 1918
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 133 x 154 cm
- Location: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany
Beckmann’s "The Night" is a painting of a cramped space where bodies are not so much placed as wedged: a hanging man on the left being tortured by an older bourgeois man smoking a pipe; the woman wearing heels with her wrists tied to a chair and her buttocks to the viewer; the child-like figure pushed to the margin ; the dangerous looking Lenin-like figure with his iconic cap and glasses ; the harlequin in the background as a sign the whole scene is a farce...
The tilted floor and skewed beams deny any stable vantage point; perspective collapses just as civic order has collapsed in post-1918 Germany. Beckmann’s color is deliberately sour – greys, dirty ochres, coagulated reds – contained by heavy black contours that recall stained glass. The violence is pointedly domestic: this is not battlefield spectacle but political turmoil and the premonition of civil unrest. However Beckmann also withholds any clear narrative, forcing us to circle between victim and perpetrator, and to recognise how easily roles can slide into one another in times of moral collapse.
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