Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife Quappi

By 1941 the Netherlands had been under German occupation for a year, and Max Beckmann, a German painter who had come to Amsterdam as a refugee in 1937, was still there, working in an attic studio in a narrow canal house on the Rokin that had once belonged to a tobacco firm. That year he painted himself with his wife Mathilde, whom everyone called Quappi. He is dressed as a man about town, a silk scarf at his neck and a bowler hat, and printed on the hat's lining is the word London. Quappi stands behind him, smaller, and the pair are pushed so far forward that the edge of the canvas cuts off his elbow and her shoulder. They touch, yet each has a separate backdrop, black behind her and a hazy yellow behind him. In 1925, the year they married, Beckmann had already painted the two of them side by side in carnival costume.