'A Dark and Violent Scene': The 1927 Painting That Foretold Germany's Downfall

A new exhibition focuses on the paintings of German painter Max Beckmann. Among them is Variety Show, an unsettling artwork depicting a chaotic cabaret scene – what does it mean, and did it foreshadow the rise of Nazism?

In the 1927 painting Variety Show by German painter Max Beckmann, a cabaret performance is turned on its head. A man in a red military overcoat lies on the floor. Another walks a slack tightrope over his supine body and nearby a figure stands with their face covered in a blue cloth, while a seemingly uninterested man on a stool faces away from the spectacle. A large dog-like creature watches in the background.

"It seems to be a stage, figures performing, but there's this idea of nobody really taking responsibility for what's going on here," art historian Lucy Wasensteiner tells the BBC. At first glance, it's a depiction of the nightlife prevalent in 1920s Germany. Entertainment during the Weimar period (1918–1933) exploded, with cabaret in particular becoming increasingly boundary-pushing, political and satirical.

But if you look longer, the mood in the artwork is less celebratory and more peculiar. What does this strange painting tell us about this precarious moment in history – and did it foreshadow the rise of Nazism?

The dramatic piece is on show in an exhibition of Beckmann's work at Hauser & Wirth in Basel, Switzerland. The artist lived through two world wars, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of fascism. He fled Germany in 1937, and moved to Amsterdam, then in 1947 to the United States. He died in New York three years later.

"He's one of the few artists coming from Germany who's not so easily classified," Carlo Knoell, director of the gallery's Basel branch, tells the BBC. "He's not like the New Objectivity [a realist movement in Germany at the time]. He's not an Expressionist. He is really going his own path."

Variety Show is a "society painting", says Knoell, "in the sense that it's looking at the state of human beings. Every figure in itself is a symbol on its own, including the awkward-looking – I don't know even if it is – dog and the orange flower shape [behind the tightrope walker]." It is a "dark and violent" scene, he says, and the man lying on the floor looks as if "he has been attacked or is out of shape or at least 'out of power'".

- Author: Precious Adesina, BBC

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