Boy with Lobster 1926

Max Beckmann made this drawing of a boy with a lobster at some point in his career, using pencil on paper. Beckmann's line here, it's all about the edges, and the way they create a flattened space. There's an area of tone behind the boy and his crustacean friend, but the figures themselves are defined by a hard dark line. That line almost looks like a woodcut, it’s so bold, but it’s also a little clumsy in places, like he was in a hurry to get it all down, to capture the weirdness of this image. Look at the boy's face, his expressionless stare, and then that lobster, held so awkwardly. I find myself thinking of other German artists like Otto Dix or George Grosz, who used similar techniques to capture the unease of life in Germany between the wars. This drawing is not just about what is depicted, but about how it's depicted, the process of drawing itself becoming a way of understanding and responding to the world. It’s art as an ongoing conversation, a way of wrestling with the big questions, without necessarily providing any easy answers.