Ecce Homo

Corinth painted this at Easter in 1925 and finished it in four days. It shows the moment in the Passion when Pilate brings the scourged, thorn-crowned Christ before the crowd with the words behold the man. It was the last history painting he made, and he died that July. The picture then had a hard life of its own. Berlin's Nationalgalerie bought it in 1929, and in 1937 the Nazi authorities stripped it from the wall as degenerate and carried it into their touring show of art meant to revolt the public. Foreign money saved it. In 1939 the Kunstmuseum Basel bought it, together with pictures by Beckmann and Kokoschka, from a regime busy selling off what it had seized. One of the figures crowded around Christ is often read as a doctor in a white coat, an echo, some say, of the illness Corinth was carrying as he worked.