The Trapeze
Artist: Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950)
Date: 1923
Dimensions:
Painting: 77 3/8 × 33 1/8 in. (196.5 × 84.1 cm)
Frame: 89 3/4 × 46 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (228 × 117.5 × 8.3 cm)
Medium: oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 1983.20
Label Text:We must participate to the full in the adversities to come. We must abandon our hearts and nerves to the horrifying cry of pain of poor, misled humanity…This is the only way to at least partially motivate our really quite superfluous existence.
—Max Beckmann
The horrors of World War I (1914–18) had a profound effect on German artist Max Beckmann. He had found success before 1914 painting heroic religious and mythological compositions, but after serving as a medical orderly on the Western Front and suffering a bout of severe mental distress, his work changed dramatically. Using acid colors and compressed space, he explored the disaffected souls performing in the “carnival” of life in a post-war Germany suffering from catastrophic inflation, violent civil uprisings, and the social crisis of a “lost generation” traumatized by the war.
Beckmann often depicted performers from the circus and cabaret—who hide behind masks and greasepaint—to express the meaninglessness of human behavior. The upside-down figure at top left who looks out at the viewer, his face made up in clown paint, is likely a self-portrait of the artist, who implicates himself in this “superfluous existence.”
—Max Beckmann
The horrors of World War I (1914–18) had a profound effect on German artist Max Beckmann. He had found success before 1914 painting heroic religious and mythological compositions, but after serving as a medical orderly on the Western Front and suffering a bout of severe mental distress, his work changed dramatically. Using acid colors and compressed space, he explored the disaffected souls performing in the “carnival” of life in a post-war Germany suffering from catastrophic inflation, violent civil uprisings, and the social crisis of a “lost generation” traumatized by the war.
Beckmann often depicted performers from the circus and cabaret—who hide behind masks and greasepaint—to express the meaninglessness of human behavior. The upside-down figure at top left who looks out at the viewer, his face made up in clown paint, is likely a self-portrait of the artist, who implicates himself in this “superfluous existence.”
Not on view
In Collection(s)