He was a bull or a bear of a man, with a slightly shambling gait and a dented cannonball of a head on which a hard derby hat was jammed like a secondary dome. His solidity and doubt come across in Self-Portrait with a Horn, painted in 1938, the second year of his exile from Nazi Germany. Max Beckmann holds a bugle, which he has just blown. His eyes don't meet yours; he looks away, listening for an answering note. It's a piercing image of the artist deprived of his context, hoping to connect, uncertain that he can. European man, signaling...
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