IN THE SUMMER OF 1932, as Hitler’s Brownshirts roamed the streets, hunting down their racial and ideological enemies, Max Beckmann began painting the most important picture of his career. Seven feet high and ten feet across, this monumental triptych was a dramatic departure from his previous pictures, which had made him the most feted artist in Germany.
Throughout the 1920s, Max Beckmann captured the zeitgeist of the Weimar Republic, mixing sorrow and champagne (as his art dealer, Israel Ber Neumann, put it). His dynamic, claustrophobic paintings evoked the queasy excitement of that era — its narcotic glamour, its dark eroticism, its aura of impending doom.
Now, with Hitler in the ascendant and the Weimar Republic on the brink of collapse, Beckmann embarked on a different sort of painting that was more enigmatic, more elemental. The side panels of this triptych showed archaic scenes of human cruelty. The central panel showed a king and queen in a small boat, adrift on the open sea. It felt like an illustration from some forgotten fable, something from
