Large Stil Life with Telescope 1927

Max Beckmann made this large still life painting with oil on canvas sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, and what strikes me is how he’s built up the composition from simple blocks of colour, a bit like a jigsaw! The paint is applied pretty thickly here, you can almost feel it. Look at that big orange telescope, all wonky and out of scale, or the way he renders the leaves of the flowers with these big, confident strokes. The composition is a little strange, and there’s this feeling that all these objects, the flowers, the telescope, the woman with the fan, are all crammed together in a way that feels slightly claustrophobic. The woman herself is mysterious, with her face hidden behind a fan, she looks out at us, but we cannot see her looking. For me, Beckmann's work has this really compelling mix of observation and invention and I can see some of those same tensions in pieces by Francis Bacon, both artists use colour and form to explore the stranger side of life. Ultimately though, what I like about this painting is that it doesn’t give you easy answers, it invites you to look and wonder.