Salvidor Dali Super-imposed with Crutches

The painter Max Beckmann turned to printmaking frequently in the early 1920s at a time when Germany was rocked by soaring inflation. Prints were the primary forms of visual art that artists could afford to make or that collectors could commit to buy under such difficult economic circumstances. One-third of Beckman’s entire print output was produced between 1922 and 1923, two of the most devastating years of post-war inflation.

In Group Portrait, Eden Bar, Beckmann employed the popular technique of woodcut. Unlike lithography and intaglio, the artist received little training in this relief print process. While admiring the look and expressive potential of the woodcut, he despaired at the time and effort it took to cut the wooden block. In Group Portrait, Eden Bar —the largest of his woodcuts—the block consists of three wooden sections joined together vertically. Beckmann was unable to disguise the seams in the final image, which he touched up with ink after printing.

The group portrait was a popular subject with Beckmann at the time. In this version three fashionably dressed members of Berlin’s social elite sit in a popular hotel bar of the period before a frieze-like group of musicians in the background. Despite such a convivial gathering, they appear alienated from each other, each glancing distractedly in a different direction. Is this psychological distance a commentary on the deteriorating economic, social, and political conditions of the embattled Weimer Republic in the difficult decade after the country’s defeat in World War I?