The Tempest

Max Beckmann began this tall, narrow picture in Frankfurt in 1930 and called it Jupiter. The king of the gods could be seen in it then, his head and part of his legs, and in that form it went on show in Basel the same year and in Berlin in 1931. The board stayed with him through everything that followed, and his diaries come back to it in 1946, 1947 and 1948. In 1949, by then living in the United States, he took it up again and painted the god out. A personified deity, he felt, was too concrete for what he was after, which he called the great unknown. That is why the museum gives it two dates, 1930 and 1946 to 49. His widow Mathilde, known as Quappi, gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1958, and a few years later she described what he had made of it, a storm in planetary space, with clouds lit by zigzag lightning, trumpets for the thunder, blowing creatures and birds for the elements, a sun and a moon partly darkened, a rainbow below and, under the fishes, the earth.