We are pleased to celebrate Max Beckmann's (1884–1950) birthday today by featuring his enigmatic painting, Stilleben mit Helm und rotem Pferdeschwanz (Still Life with Helmet and Red Horse's Tail), 1943. It has a thorough provenance: the painting traveled directly from the artist’s studio in Amsterdam to his wife, Mathilde von Kaulbach (a.k.a. Quappi), in New York, then to the Buchholz Gallery, run by the widely respected German art dealer Curt Valentin, then to the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago, then back to New York to the Serge Sabarsky Gallery, eventually ending its long journey with us.

Beckmann painted this still life during exile in Amsterdam, where he moved in 1937, after the Nazis seized many of his works from German museums and declared him a "degenerate" artist. His work from this period of exile was characterized by a turn toward abstraction.

In Still Life with Helmet and Red Horse’s Tail, Beckmann depicts an arrangement of charged objects on a table, including a blue helmet topped with a luxurious red horse's tail set behind a mirror reflecting water and impaled by a triangular shard.

The artist mentioned this painting twice in his diary.

November 7, 1943: "After a while in the morning again a lot of air-raid warnings. Still Life with Helmet and Red Horse's Tail and Mirror completed."

November 30, 1943: "Red and green still life. Red one reworked again."

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Achim Moeller