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

When I talk to visitors about Max Beckmann’s art, they usually ask me to explain what it means. Who are these strange figures? What are they doing and why? Generations of scholars have tried to decode Beckmann’s art with limited success. My advice to you is to enjoy the mystery. There are no definitive answers, and that’s what makes his paintings so intriguing.

The Dream is especially enigmatic, and it’s accumulated a lot of interpretations in the last 100 years. Here’s one. In 1924 Wilhelm Fraenger described the painting as made up of three separate dreams, all connected by the celebration of Fasching, the German equivalent of Mardi Gras. In one dream, a girl from the countryside sits on her luggage and imagines two men she met on the city streets dressed in Fasching costumes: a blind organ grinder blowing a horn and a man on crutches with amputated feet. In the second—a nightmare—a prison inmate wearing a red-and-white-striped uniform climbs a ladder blocked by the ceiling. His hands are amputated, and he carries a dead fish in a sling. The last dream is happier. A woman dressed for a masked ball rolls on the floor with abandon, the cello a substitute for an imaginary romantic partner.

Fraenger might be right; his account certainly fits the details of the painting. It also underscores the tension between reality and fantasy in The Dream and in Beckmann’s art generally. Viewers in 1920s Berlin like Fraenger recognized individual elements of the painting, like the girl on her luggage or the Fasching costumes. But the way Beckmann combines them is chaotic and disorienting. This uncomfortable space between familiarity and strangeness is where he thrived.