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Lot Essay
Beckmann often included objects from his own domestic surroundings in his still lifes. In Stilleben mit Rosen, painted in Frankfurt in 1927, he incorporated his own smoking pipe and the daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, into the composition. The objects are isolated from each other and set starkly against a dominant black background. This articulates Beckmann’s claim that “it is, in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence” and that the primary aim of his work was “to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting—to make the invisible visible through reality” (quoted in P. Selz, Max Beckmann, New York, 1996, p. 101).
Stilleben mit Rosen can be seen within the context of the long tradition of vanitas painting, where classic symbols—here the wilted leaves of the flowers, the pipe whose smoke dissipates and fades away, and the open door leading to black emptiness—are meant to remind the viewer of their own mortality, referring to existential questions of death, hollowness, the unknown and transcendence. In the aftermath of the war, Beckmann, like many other artists, abandoned the utopian visions of the Expressionists in favor of a more tangible and meaningful reality. As Beckmann put it, his heart was “attuned rather to a rougher more ordinary, more vulgar art. Not the kind that lives dreamy fairy-tale moods in a poetic trance, but which gives direct access to the frightful, vulgar, spectacular, ordinary, grotesquely banal in life; an art that can always be immediately present to us where life is most real’ (quoted in Max Beckmann, Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985, p. 18).
(fig. 1) The artist in the late 1920s.
Stilleben mit Rosen can be seen within the context of the long tradition of vanitas painting, where classic symbols—here the wilted leaves of the flowers, the pipe whose smoke dissipates and fades away, and the open door leading to black emptiness—are meant to remind the viewer of their own mortality, referring to existential questions of death, hollowness, the unknown and transcendence. In the aftermath of the war, Beckmann, like many other artists, abandoned the utopian visions of the Expressionists in favor of a more tangible and meaningful reality. As Beckmann put it, his heart was “attuned rather to a rougher more ordinary, more vulgar art. Not the kind that lives dreamy fairy-tale moods in a poetic trance, but which gives direct access to the frightful, vulgar, spectacular, ordinary, grotesquely banal in life; an art that can always be immediately present to us where life is most real’ (quoted in Max Beckmann, Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985, p. 18).
(fig. 1) The artist in the late 1920s.