Jonathan Jones’s choice of Max Beckmann’s painting Die Nacht to illustrate “Weimar excess” was unfortunate (Bootleggers, bondage and law-breaking bashes! The scandalous history of the wild party, 31 January).
Far from showing a “party from hell, with bondage, in a room that’s drunkenly shrinking”, it is in fact an allegorical depiction of the tragedy of war and revolution. The viewer is forced to witness the murderous assault on a family hiding in an attic. The fact that the artist depicts his own family renders the tragedy even more poignant: the man with a bandaged head is clearly Beckmann himself; the child abducted by a revolutionary was modelled on his son, Peter; the woman tied and with splayed legs after rape is his wife, Minna. Suffused with Christian imagery, the theme is martyrdom: the strangled man with upturned soles and signs of stigmata recalls Christ’s crucifixion on altar paintings of the old masters Beckmann so much admired.
Any number of examples or satirical portrayals of Weimar excess by George Grosz or Otto Dix et al might have been suitable for Jones’s argument, but Die Nacht definitely is not.
Cornelie Usborne
Professor emerita of history, Roehampton University