Speaker 
 
Melissa Venator  
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Modern Art  
Saint Louis Art Museum   

This monumental painting of the sinking of the Titanic is easily the most popular work by Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum. He was a young painter, only 28 years old, when news of the disaster reached him in Berlin. The painting illustrates early accounts: women and children in their nightclothes crowded onto lifeboats in the frigid water off Newfoundland. The famous ship sits high on the horizon, its yellow lights silhouetted against the dark sky, along with the lethal iceberg. But Beckmann focuses on the human drama in the water, where survivors cling to lifeboats and struggle to climb aboard. Some are pushed away, condemned to certain death.

The Saint Louis Art Museum is home to 40 paintings by Beckmann, the largest collection in the world. It’s so comprehensive that it spans Beckmann’s entire career: from his realism before World War I to his first experiments with abstraction between the wars and the enigmatic figures of his exile during World War II. Most of these paintings were gifted by the St. Louis collector Morton D. May, a third-generation retailing executive whose family company owned the Famous-Barr department store. Beckmann was May’s first passion, and he pledged to assemble the world’s best collection of his paintings, which he gave to the Museum along with thousands of works of modern European, African, Oceanic, and ancient American art.