Max Beckmann, Birds Hell - New Objectivity

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In a claustrophobic cellar, all possible exits are blocked. A nightmarish episode unfolds: the torture of a naked, shackled man by a crazed pod of anthropomorphic birds, an operation overseen by a multi-breasted female, who can be seen emerging from a huge eggshell like a nightmarish jack-in-the-box.

Welcome to Hölle der Vögel (‘Birds’ Hell’), a painting by Germany’s Max Beckmann from 1937-38. His nationality and the date are crucial: Beckmann completed this scene — an allegory of Nazi rule — while in exile in Amsterdam.
The artist doubtless identified with the picture’s victim, who is having lines carved into his back with a knife or perhaps even being skinned. In July 1937, Hitler had launched an attack on avant-garde artists, threatening them with imprisonment or castration.
Nearly 600 works by Beckmann were confiscated from German galleries, and he was one of the principal artists included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition staged by the Nazis in Munich in a bid to name and shame those deemed to be ‘driving forces of corruption’. Fearful of further persecution, the 53-year-old Beckmann fled with his wife Mathilde to the Netherlands on 19 July 1937 — the same day on which the show opened.

The victim in Birds’ Hell, however, surely represents the decent, average German. To his left is a table on which we can see some of the good things he enjoyed before the torturers entered: a book (symbol of learning), a bunch of grapes (symbol of charity) and a candle (symbol of enlightenment).

To 21st-century viewers, this scene of unhinged, ornithological attack calls to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie, The Birds. For Beckmann, his artistic inspirations were the hellish, medieval visions of Northern European painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald.
The demon-in-chief in Birds’ Hell occupies centre stage. It’s not entirely clear whether she's screaming or smiling crudely. She doesn’t represent Adolf Hitler so much as personify the National Socialist party as a whole, raising her right arm in a Sieg Heil salute. Newly hatched, she signifies a horrifying new era.


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