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Max Beckmann, Paris Society, 1931

Paris Society is Max Beckmann’s portrait of émigrés, aristocrats, businessmen, and intellectuals engaged in disjointed festivity on the eve of the Third Reich. Beckmann was invited to paint this work by the German embassy in Paris. A series of sketches shows that Beckmann had conceived of the composition as early as 1925. By 1931, when he completed it, accusations and slander against the freethinking artist had begun to mount in Germany, and the somber character of Paris Society seems to reflect his sense of foreboding. Beckmann spent much time in Paris, but financial hardship stemming from his persecution led him to give up his studio there.

Paris Society is rife with ambiguities. The event depicted is a black-tie party, although the socialites gathered there seem strangely depressed. Some of the figures in the composition were identified by the artist’s widow, Mathilde Beckmann. They include the central figure, Beckmann’s friend Prince Karl Anton Rohan; the Frankfurt banker Albert Hahn at the far right; the music historian Paul Hirsch seated at the left; the German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch at the lower right, with his head in his hands; and possibly Paul Poiret, the French couturier, standing at the left. But why they are together in this scene and what their peculiar postures denote remain a matter of speculation.

In café, hotel, and beach scenes, Beckmann had proven himself to be a mordant painter of modern life, and some German critics counted him among the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit. The universalizing tendency of his moral allegories, however, diverged from the political satire of his colleagues. Beckmann’s paintings do not succumb to precise interpretation. In spite of their period detail, they seem to represent a condition rather than a historical moment.

Paris Society (Gesellschaft Paris), 1931. Oil on canvas, 43 X 69 1/8 inches. 70.1927.