The Night

Beckmann began this in 1918, as the German Empire collapsed into defeat and revolution and armed gangs fought in the streets. He had gone into the war half-believing it might somehow cleanse and renew society. Serving as a medical orderly, he saw enough wounds and dying to break that idea and, for a while, to break him. The Night is what came out of it. In a low, cramped room three intruders have burst in on an ordinary family. One man is being hanged and having his arm wrenched from its socket, a woman is bound to the frame of the room, a child dragged aside. Everything is jammed at harsh angles, the bodies crushed into a space too small for them. Beckmann wanted it seen as a modern history painting, tinged, as he put it, with a sense of evil.