Frontal Self-Portrait with House Gable in Background 1918

This self-portrait by Max Beckmann is rendered with drypoint on paper, a flurry of dark, wiry lines scraping and scratching at the surface to form an image. I imagine Beckmann hunched over the plate, dragging a needle across it with varying degrees of pressure, building up the darks and leaving areas of light like a stark revelation. He's staring directly at us, his mouth a tight, disapproving line. What was he thinking? Maybe something like, "I’ll show them," or "I'm here; I exist!" There’s a kind of defiance in his gaze. The marks around the face feel frantic and the overall effect is unnerving. Yet there's also a sense of vulnerability, as if the very act of portraying himself is a kind of exposure. Beckmann wasn’t afraid to engage with the anxieties of his time, and this work feels like a raw, unfiltered expression of the self in a world on edge.