Still Life with Three Skulls

In the winter of 1944 the western Netherlands began to starve. The German occupiers had blocked food and fuel from reaching the cities, and in Amsterdam people burned their furniture to keep warm and ate sugar beet and tulip bulbs. Max Beckmann, a German painter living there in exile, painted this still life in the last months of the war. He later called those years a truly grotesque time, full to the brim with work, Nazi persecutions, bombs and hunger. The objects are the old ones of the vanitas, the kind of still life meant to remind the viewer of death, three skulls, a candle that has gone out, a few playing cards. Beckmann sets them in flattened space with heavy black all around them, and lays the paint on thick and rough. The German forces in the Netherlands surrendered on 5 May 1945. On 29 May Beckmann sold the picture to the Amsterdam office of the art dealers Paul Cassirer, possibly through Helmuth Lütjens, who ran it and had known him through the war. By the autumn of 1946 it was in New York with the dealer Curt Valentin, who sold it that November to Lois Orswell, a collector in Connecticut. She gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1967.