Descent from the Cross (Beckmann)

The gaunt, broken body of Christ is lowered from a cross, his limbs stretched and twisted into harsh angles, the figures pressed flat against a cramped, airless space. Max Beckmann painted the Descent from the Cross just after the First World War, which had left him traumatized, and he strips the sacred subject of all consolation - the emaciated Christ a victim of modern horror rather than a promise of redemption. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, it recasts the old theme in the bitter, angular language of postwar German art, suffering rendered without comfort.