print
- Museum number
- 1981,0725.48
- Title
- Object: Verführung (Seduction)
- Description
-
Seduction; woman reclining with head lowered, head of man behind. 1923
Woodcut, on oriental paper
- Production date
- 1923
- Dimensions
-
Height: 158 millimetres
-
Width: 243 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Text from Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, 'The Print in Germany 1880-1933', BM 1984, no. 155
Beckmann's first woodcuts were made in 1920, and he made a number of others in 1922-3 (eighteen prints in total) without the technique ever becoming as important to him as drypoint or lithography. He seems never to have been happy using a knife or gouge, and almost all his woodblocks were worked by a process of attrition, cutting away at the surface with a graving tool. In this print, one of his finest woodcuts, the tone is created by a network of hatched lines, thus leaving a disconcerting number of black flecks in white areas. Perhaps unhappy about the crack running down the centre of the block, Beckmann never published the print and only a few impressions survive; according to Hofmaier this is the unique impression of the first state, while only four of the second are known.
The subject looks back to a number of earlier prints in which a woman is observed through a window by a man (e.g. 'Frau in der Nacht', Gallwitz 147, of 1920). In this print the theme and title are directly related to Beckmann himself by making the head an obvious self-portrait. It is perhaps not unreasonable to connect this with his meeting in 1923 Mathilde von Kaulbach in Vienna; he subsequently divorced his first wife Minna, and married Mathilde in September 1925. A later drypoint of the same year entitled 'Siesta' (Gallwitz 238) shows Beckmann seated contemplating a half-naked woman lying on a bed. (See Fischer, 'Max Beckmann, Symbol und Weltbild', 1972, 136-53 on the theme of temptation in his work.)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1984/5 Sept-Jan, BM, 'The Print in Germany 1880-1933', BM 1984, no. 155
- Acquisition date
- 1981
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1981,0725.48
