Max Beckmann: Dream of Life

Description: "Art serves understanding, not entertainment," reads one of Max Beckmann's dictums. Beckmann's oeuvre, widely acknowledged to be some of the most significant German art of the twentieth century, contains a wealth of existential and contemporary historical convictions and questions. This representative selection of some 60 figurative paintings done between 1917 and the artist's death in 1950 unfolds the entire panorama of his career, from violent works reflecting the shock of war to pieces from his later years in New York, from the Cubism and Expressionism of his youth to the Symbolism of his later age. The Dream of Life sheds new light on the development of Beckmann's techniques, ideas and central themes: cabaret, music, the world of the theater, dreams and reality, sensual settings and the role of the female muse, as well as his unusual use of romantic visual motifs in landscapes and urban contexts. The authors focus on conceptual aspects of Beckmann's work which have heretofore been neglected.