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Lot Essay
Following his volunteer experience as a World War I medical orderly, Beckmann shifted radically both his subject matter and style from the previous years of the Berlin Secession. The trauma of his experience drastically altered Beckmann's approach to visual communication as the artist's perspective dovetailed with the tenets of the burgeoning movement of "new objectivity" - a movement marked not only by probing realism but also by scathing social criticism.
Beckmann's extraordinary 1919 print portfolio Die Holle (Hell) not only exemplifies this dramatic shift in style but also brilliantly chronicles Germany's climate of social and economic upheaval. The seventh of the portfolio's eleven sheets is Malepartus, a title of disparate and symbolic meanings. Literally translated as "bad seed" in Latin, Malepartus was the designation of the macabre castle in Goethe's Reineke Fuchs and the name of a popular nightclub in Frankfurt. In the present work, one of the rare existing drawings for the portfolio, the artist brilliantly provides a treatise on human weakness and vice. Proving once again that nothing occurs by accident in Beckmann's work, he draws upon the multiple definitions of Malepartus and creates an atmosphere that conflates both bloody castle and bawdy nightclub.
(fig. 1) Preparatory drawing for the present lot. BARCODE 24769501
Beckmann's extraordinary 1919 print portfolio Die Holle (Hell) not only exemplifies this dramatic shift in style but also brilliantly chronicles Germany's climate of social and economic upheaval. The seventh of the portfolio's eleven sheets is Malepartus, a title of disparate and symbolic meanings. Literally translated as "bad seed" in Latin, Malepartus was the designation of the macabre castle in Goethe's Reineke Fuchs and the name of a popular nightclub in Frankfurt. In the present work, one of the rare existing drawings for the portfolio, the artist brilliantly provides a treatise on human weakness and vice. Proving once again that nothing occurs by accident in Beckmann's work, he draws upon the multiple definitions of Malepartus and creates an atmosphere that conflates both bloody castle and bawdy nightclub.
(fig. 1) Preparatory drawing for the present lot. BARCODE 24769501