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Lot Essay
Die Hölle ('Hell') is, in the words of Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, 'Beckmann's most ambitious and sustained achievement in narrative printmaking' (Carey & Griffiths, p. 174). In complete sets, it is also the rarest of his great print series. Begun around 10 May 1919, six months after the end of first World War almost to the day, the set comprises eleven transfer lithographs, including a self-portrait which served as a frontispiece. Given the complexity and almost monumental size of these prints, the largest Beckmann ever created, it is worth describing them briefly one by one:
Plate 1: Self-Portrait shows the artist, possibly at work, looking wide-eyed and disturbed, with a furrowed brow and messy cropped hair. The image is also used on the front cover, where it is accompanied by two sarcastic inscriptions by the artist: Hell. A great spectacle in 10 pictures by Beckmann; and below the image: We beg our esteemed public to step forward. You have the pleasant prospect that perhaps for ten minutes you won't be bored. Anyone who is not delighted will get his money back. (quoted and transl. ibid.).
Plate 2: The Way Home includes another portrait of the artist, wearing a bowler hat (see also lot 330). He is seen walking the streets at night, speaking to a beggar with a facial injury, who has lost an eye and his lower arm. In the background, other figures with war injuries and walking on crutches are discernible under the street lamps.
Plate 3: The Street shows a crowded scene with a great variety of people milling about the city in bright sunshine: men wearing bowler hats and suits or overcoats, a man without hands and legs in a wheelchair, a downcast looking man and an elderly woman with glaring eyes, a student playing a flute, a blind man, a young man in a jester-like costume and in the background two women observing the street life from a window.
Plate 4: The Martyrdom is another street scene at night. Here a woman with her arms stretched out to the sides, reminiscent of Christ's descent from the Cross, is assaulted by several men with a shotgun and the butt of a rifle. Her attackers are militia-men, a general with starred epaulettes, and a smiling, bald man wearing a dinner jacket and tartan trousers. In the background, a car is waiting to take her away. It has been established that the image follows the account of the murder of the socialist theoretician and activist Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), published in Die Rote Fahne on 12 February 1919, a month after she was killed and thrown into the Landwehrkanal in Berlin, and three months before Beckman began working on this series (see Hofmaier, no. 142, p. 386).
Plate 5: Hunger depicts a family, including one child (presumably the artist's son Peter) seated around a dinner table, praying. At the centre of the table is a single bowl of sardines or whitebait and half a bread bun.
Plate 6: The Ideologists is a dense and confusing composition of a number of people, collage-like thrown together in an undefined interior. Each person, both men and women, seem to be thinking or declaring an opinion, but no one is listening to any of the others. Some of the characters have been tentatively identified as known intellectuals of the time (see Hofmaier, no. 144, p. 390).
Plate 7: Night shows a gruesome scene in a garret at night: a man and a woman, in the presence of their child, are hung, tortured and abused by a gang of burglars or political thugs. The print is closely related to a painting, now at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen, Düsseldorf, which Beckmann had painted between August 1918 and March 1919.
Plate 8: Malepartus was the name of a nightclub in Frankfurt. The print depicts a number of couples in glamorous evening dress on the dancefloor, a bottle and some glasses in the foreground, two guitarists and a violin player are seen in an alcove above the dancers.
Plate 9: The Patriotic Song is played on a harmonica and a violin to a small group of people gathered around a table. It is a miserable-looking party, too tired or drunk to pay attention, including two unshaven men still wearing remnants of a soldier's uniform. On the table are two cups decorated with the Prussian armorial eagle.
Plate 10: The Last Ones is a confusing scene of a street combat. A group of men are aiming their rifles and a machine gun out of a garret window, while two lie injured or dead on the floor, one with his bowels exposed. The title suggests that this is the last stand of a revolutionary uprising.
Plate 11: The Family concludes the series with a domestic scene and another self-portrait. Beckmann depicts himself together with his mother-in-law, Minna Tube-Römpler, and his son Peter in a room. The child wears a tin army helmet and joyously plays with two hand grenades. Beckmann, smartly dressed, glares at the boy and seems to tell him off, while Minna raises her hands in a plea for peace amongst father and son.
The prints are not strictly rectangular, but have slanted or jagged edges, with elements of the composition protruding beyond the borderlines, seemingly bursting out of the picture plane. Within these claustrophobic spaces, the rules of perspective are broken and the spatial relations between figures, buildings and objects undefined. Referring to the painting Die Nacht, which may have given Beckmann the inspiration to the whole series, Olaf Peters described this manner insightfully as 'eine zeitgemäße Kombination aus spätmittelalterlichem Detailfanatismus und kubistischer Raumerfahrung' ('a timely combination of late medieval detail-fanaticism and a cubist perception of space') and summarized the effect as 'schmerzhafte anschauliche Erfahrung' ('a painful visual experience') (O. Peters, 'Auf tönernen Füßen - Max Beckmann und Rudolf Schlichter zwischen den Weltkriegen', in: S. Heckmann & H. Ottomeyer (eds.), Kassandra - Visionen des Unheils 1914-1945, exh. cat., Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, November 2008 - February 2009, p. 89). This defines precisely the formal language Beckmann had developed for his grandiose, inexorable graphic essay on the state of Germany immediately after the war. Die Hölle is indeed, as Carey and Griffiths phrased it, 'an appalling picture of a society in collapse' - a picture which proved no less accurate and timely for many years to come.
Plate 1: Self-Portrait shows the artist, possibly at work, looking wide-eyed and disturbed, with a furrowed brow and messy cropped hair. The image is also used on the front cover, where it is accompanied by two sarcastic inscriptions by the artist: Hell. A great spectacle in 10 pictures by Beckmann; and below the image: We beg our esteemed public to step forward. You have the pleasant prospect that perhaps for ten minutes you won't be bored. Anyone who is not delighted will get his money back. (quoted and transl. ibid.).
Plate 2: The Way Home includes another portrait of the artist, wearing a bowler hat (see also lot 330). He is seen walking the streets at night, speaking to a beggar with a facial injury, who has lost an eye and his lower arm. In the background, other figures with war injuries and walking on crutches are discernible under the street lamps.
Plate 3: The Street shows a crowded scene with a great variety of people milling about the city in bright sunshine: men wearing bowler hats and suits or overcoats, a man without hands and legs in a wheelchair, a downcast looking man and an elderly woman with glaring eyes, a student playing a flute, a blind man, a young man in a jester-like costume and in the background two women observing the street life from a window.
Plate 4: The Martyrdom is another street scene at night. Here a woman with her arms stretched out to the sides, reminiscent of Christ's descent from the Cross, is assaulted by several men with a shotgun and the butt of a rifle. Her attackers are militia-men, a general with starred epaulettes, and a smiling, bald man wearing a dinner jacket and tartan trousers. In the background, a car is waiting to take her away. It has been established that the image follows the account of the murder of the socialist theoretician and activist Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), published in Die Rote Fahne on 12 February 1919, a month after she was killed and thrown into the Landwehrkanal in Berlin, and three months before Beckman began working on this series (see Hofmaier, no. 142, p. 386).
Plate 5: Hunger depicts a family, including one child (presumably the artist's son Peter) seated around a dinner table, praying. At the centre of the table is a single bowl of sardines or whitebait and half a bread bun.
Plate 6: The Ideologists is a dense and confusing composition of a number of people, collage-like thrown together in an undefined interior. Each person, both men and women, seem to be thinking or declaring an opinion, but no one is listening to any of the others. Some of the characters have been tentatively identified as known intellectuals of the time (see Hofmaier, no. 144, p. 390).
Plate 7: Night shows a gruesome scene in a garret at night: a man and a woman, in the presence of their child, are hung, tortured and abused by a gang of burglars or political thugs. The print is closely related to a painting, now at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen, Düsseldorf, which Beckmann had painted between August 1918 and March 1919.
Plate 8: Malepartus was the name of a nightclub in Frankfurt. The print depicts a number of couples in glamorous evening dress on the dancefloor, a bottle and some glasses in the foreground, two guitarists and a violin player are seen in an alcove above the dancers.
Plate 9: The Patriotic Song is played on a harmonica and a violin to a small group of people gathered around a table. It is a miserable-looking party, too tired or drunk to pay attention, including two unshaven men still wearing remnants of a soldier's uniform. On the table are two cups decorated with the Prussian armorial eagle.
Plate 10: The Last Ones is a confusing scene of a street combat. A group of men are aiming their rifles and a machine gun out of a garret window, while two lie injured or dead on the floor, one with his bowels exposed. The title suggests that this is the last stand of a revolutionary uprising.
Plate 11: The Family concludes the series with a domestic scene and another self-portrait. Beckmann depicts himself together with his mother-in-law, Minna Tube-Römpler, and his son Peter in a room. The child wears a tin army helmet and joyously plays with two hand grenades. Beckmann, smartly dressed, glares at the boy and seems to tell him off, while Minna raises her hands in a plea for peace amongst father and son.
The prints are not strictly rectangular, but have slanted or jagged edges, with elements of the composition protruding beyond the borderlines, seemingly bursting out of the picture plane. Within these claustrophobic spaces, the rules of perspective are broken and the spatial relations between figures, buildings and objects undefined. Referring to the painting Die Nacht, which may have given Beckmann the inspiration to the whole series, Olaf Peters described this manner insightfully as 'eine zeitgemäße Kombination aus spätmittelalterlichem Detailfanatismus und kubistischer Raumerfahrung' ('a timely combination of late medieval detail-fanaticism and a cubist perception of space') and summarized the effect as 'schmerzhafte anschauliche Erfahrung' ('a painful visual experience') (O. Peters, 'Auf tönernen Füßen - Max Beckmann und Rudolf Schlichter zwischen den Weltkriegen', in: S. Heckmann & H. Ottomeyer (eds.), Kassandra - Visionen des Unheils 1914-1945, exh. cat., Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, November 2008 - February 2009, p. 89). This defines precisely the formal language Beckmann had developed for his grandiose, inexorable graphic essay on the state of Germany immediately after the war. Die Hölle is indeed, as Carey and Griffiths phrased it, 'an appalling picture of a society in collapse' - a picture which proved no less accurate and timely for many years to come.