Exploring Art & History: Max Beckmann’s [Paris] Society at Weimar’s End

Dr. Barbara (Suzy) Buenger, Professor Emerita of art history at UW-Madison, discusses Max Beckmann’s sardonic Society based on the March 1931 reception at the German Embassy in Paris that honored the opening of his first one-man exhibition in that city. The canvas was begun six years earlier, during the first flourishing of the Weimar Republic, as a depiction of Frankfurt high society at the moment Beckmann came to enjoy new professional and social prominence and prepared to marry an aristocrat. His painting is far more than just a satire of human interactions at the Paris reception; it reverberates with tensions of the world economic crisis and annus horribilis that uncoiled as he completed the work from June through late October 1931.