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.
