Insights and Symbolism in Max Beckmann’s The Dream

The Dream. Max Beckmann, 1921

In the room of Max Beckman paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum, rarely does anyone stop at The Dream. It’s a walk by. The work is cryptic and not easily accessible without some familiarity of Beckmann and the dismal state of affairs of post war Weimar Germany. Picasso’s Guernica has more symbolism but with the plethora of web sites that decode Guernica, crowds gather in front of the massive image and in a polyglot of recitations, spout “their” interpretations.

The 5 people in The Dream are tightly packed into small room in an attic, the room of a building with the lowest rent and inhabited by the least socially acceptable. The three men are invalids. One has amputations of both legs, another of both hands, and the third man is blind. Men with amputations were a common sight in German cities after the war. During WWI the lethal advances in armament technology outstripped medical advances. Without amputations, mud contaminated shrapnel wounds with exposed bone would become infected with sepsis or gangrene. The prevailing use of occlusive bandages was part of the problem. Blindness often developed because of the use of chlorine and phosgene gasses as weapons. A street organ is hanging from his neck and he is wearing a sign to remind people to be thankful for the light in their eyes and not to forget the poor blind man. Most of the blind veterans were reduced to begging or selling pencils. The girl who is sitting on a trunk with labels for Lehrter, a Berlin railroad station, is most likely a newly arrived prostitute from a village. Her long straight hair is not bobbed in the fashionable flapper style or bubikopf that was seen in the cities. When Beckmann was working on The Dream, inflation was almost triple digits. The economic ruin of many middle class families meant that unskilled women employed as domestics were suddenly unemployed. The large number of prostitutes continued to increase as single women and widows moved to Berlin. Her left forearm and hand are in a position as if she were requesting money. She is the only person in the room with her eyes open. She stares at the bizarre events and her Kaspar doll claps his hands in approval. The yellow strands dripping out of the sleeping woman’s dress are the purulent discharge of a venereal disease. Beckmann wasn’t the only artist during the New Objectivity to overtly portray venereal disease. Two Victims of Capitalism (1923) by Otto Dix shows a prostitute with a syphilitic lesion on her face that looks like a bullet hole and a veteran with a large gaping shrapnel wound on his cheek that is shaped like a vagina.

The room is out of kilter because of the floor, which is unusual in paintings or set designs. The effect is usually because the ceiling or walls are not plumb. The floor is like one large stretcher that was used to transport the wounded from the battlefield to the crowded medical facilities where they were not likely to leave intact. The slanted picture frame behind the blind man is a dormer window that goes nowhere. The characters are trapped in this crowded space. The characters on the sloping floor and ladder unify this atypically tall and narrow painting vertically.

Beckmann was fascinated by Northern Gothic paintings, with their foregrounds packed with people with angular forms and no rules of perspective. During his post battlefield period of depression complicated with agitation and nightmares he painted several paintings of Christ’s suffering.

Descent from the Cross. Max Beckmann, 1917

Descent from the Cross (1917) has jagged, angular observers and an emaciated Christ with elongated arms. A large ladder towers over a small cross.

Self Portrait with a Red Scarf (1917)

Beckmann served from 1914 to 1915 as a medical orderly. He was released from service because of shell shock or what today would be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Crowded Claustrophobic works appeared in his work after he was released from the army. The colors are thin and light. Skin tones look like cadavers. His Self Portrait with a Red Scarf (1917) reveals himself with an ashen emaciated face, sunken eyes and prominent facial bones.

Self- portrait with Champagne Glass (1919) 

Self- portrait with Champagne Glass was done after series of political assassinations in January 1919 and a few months after he was in Berlin during street battles of the March Rebellion of 1919. He still has the same appearance but now he is able to hold the champagne glass upright while everything else in the painting is distorted. Alcohol could provide the escape and comfort needed in a violent distorted city.

Nailing of Christ to the Cross, Master of the 

Karlsruhe Passion c. 1450.

The Dream has been compared to Nailing of Christ to the Cross (c. 1450) by Master of the Karlsruhe Passion. Art historian and former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter Selz has noted that the boy kneeling on the cross and staring at the viewer is in the same location as the young girl in The Dream. The sleeping maid is in the same position as the soldier tying the rope on the cross. The man driving the nail into Jesus’ hand is in a similar location as the man with a bandage on his amputated hand. The fish partially lying on the ladder has been substituted for Christ lying on the cross. The ladder, a symbol for the ascension, a connection between heaven and earth, goes nowhere in this painting.

Beckmann’s use of somnambulists may be related to the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that was released in early 1920 and featured an insane hypnotist who commands a somnambulist to commit murders. The men in The Dream, two of them now wearing circus costumes, blindly marched off to war during the fervor of the August Madness, under the control of the folly of their Government.

The suffering of the German people after WWI doesn’t arouse the sympathy that victims of Nazi atrocities do. Future generations exposed to revisionist history are the ones who will realize that without a vindictive Versailles Treaty and the impossible reparations payments imposed on Germany, there might not have been a Guernica.

The signage next to the Beckmann paintings in Saint Louis is paltry and provides a pittance of information that doesn’t help much to decode his enigmatic works. The room will continue to be a walk by for most visitors. Wake Up Saint Louis and Show Me MOre information.