Study for the painting The Nice in Frankfurt am Main 1921

Max Beckmann made this study for the painting The Nice in Frankfurt am Main with pencil on paper. It's all about lines here, isn’t it? Quick, searching lines, that build up into these solid-looking buildings. There’s something so intimate about a drawing like this, you can almost feel Beckmann's hand moving across the page. The lines aren't precious; they overlap, change direction, and sometimes just trail off. I like the little tree on the left – just a few strokes, but it totally reads as a tree, and it's even got this kind of awkward, gangly charm. And those figures sketched in at the bottom! They're so loose and gestural, like he's just trying to capture the feeling of people milling about. Beckmann’s drawings always remind me a little of Kirchner’s, both in that German Expressionist tradition. But Beckmann has this solidity, a kind of groundedness. This piece reminds us that art is always a process, a way of seeing and feeling and thinking through the world.