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Max Beckmann, Birthday Clown
Artsy Editorial
One of the great German Expressionists, Max Beckmann (born this day in 1884) often painted clowns and carnival imagery to convey the climate of post-war Germany—a commentary on the circus of life much like the fools depicted by Shakespeare and Goya. In Self portrait as a clown, Beckmann depicts himself as a costumed circus character, but only a fool would dare ask for explanation: “If people cannot understand it themselves with the help of their own inner world, it makes no sense to show the thing,” he once wrote.
Artsy Editorial