Autoritratto con sciarpa rossa

Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly when the war began in 1914, and what he saw in the field hospitals of Belgium broke him. In 1915 he suffered a nervous collapse and was discharged. He painted this self-portrait two years later, in 1917, having settled in Frankfurt and still working through what the war had done to him. He turns his head sharply toward us, the red scarf wound tight at his throat, the space around him cramped and angular, as if the room is pressing in. Around this time he said he wanted to enclose the unspeakable things of life in sharp, crystalline lines. You can see that in the flattened, hardened planes of the face, and in the tension of the gaze he fixes on us.