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Artist or Maker: Max Beckmann (1884-1950)

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Description: Malepartus
signed 'Beckmann' (lower right); inscribed, dated and titled 'Originalzeichnung zu "Malepartus 1919"' (lower left).
black crayon and pencil on Japan paper
28 5/8 x 18 1/2 in. (73.2 x 48 cm)
Executed in 1919

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Provenance: Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York.
B.C. Holland, Inc., Chicago.
Acquired from the above by the present owners, 1974.

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Exhibited: New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Cambridge, Massachussetts, Busch-Reisinger Museum; and Stuttgart, Staatgalerie, German Realist Drawings of the 1920s, May-December 1986, no. 1.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Selections from the Francey and Dr. Martin L. Gecht Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago, November 2003-January 2004, p. 173, no. 29 (illustrated, p. 38).

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Published: J. Hofmaier, Max Beckmann: Catalogue raisonné of his prints, Bern, 1990, p. 394.

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Notes: Property from the Collection of Francey and Dr. Martin L. Gecht

Following his volunteer experience as a World War I medical orderly, Beckmann shifted radically both his subject matter and style from the previous years of the Berlin Secession. The trauma of his experience drastically altered Beckmann's approach to visual communication as the artist's perspective dovetailed with the tenets of the burgeoning movement of "new objectivity" - a movement marked not only by probing realism but also by scathing social criticism.

Beckmann's extraordinary 1919 print portfolio Die Holle (Hell) not only exemplifies this dramatic shift in style but also brilliantly chronicles Germany's climate of social and economic upheaval. The seventh of the portfolio's eleven sheets is Malepartus, a title of disparate and symbolic meanings. Literally translated as "bad seed" in Latin, Malepartus was the designation of the macabre castle in Goethe's Reineke Fuchs and the name of a popular nightclub in Frankfurt. In the present work, one of the rare existing drawings for the portfolio, the artist brilliantly provides a treatise on human weakness and vice. Proving once again that nothing occurs by accident in Beckmann's work, he draws upon the multiple definitions of Malepartus and creates an atmosphere that conflates both bloody castle and bawdy nightclub.

(fig. 1) Preparatory drawing for the present lot. BARCODE 24769501