Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait with Horn

In August of 2008, The New York Times' Ken Johnson wrote, "Max Beckmann's 'Self-Portrait with Horn' is one of the finest treasures of the Neue Galerie... Painted in brusque, brushy strokes in high-contrast darks and lights, it depicts the artist in a black-and-orange striped dressing gown holding up a silver hunter's horn in one sausage-fingered hand. He looks sideways with an intent expression as though he had sounded a note and was awaiting an answering response. Or he may be listening for the hounds of war." Beckmann painted "Self-Portrait with Horn" in 1938, just after he and his wife fled Nazi Germany to seek refuge in Amsterdam, and it evokes the tribulations of an entire generation. This volume celebrates this painting and the special place it holds for the Neue Galerie. Art historian Jill Lloyd brings her superb scholarship to bear in tracing the work's history and its importance within the Beckmann oeuvre.