Self-Portrait with a Cigarette

The artist stares out hard from the shadows, a cigarette held in his hand, his face lit harshly against the dark, his expression wary and unillusioned. Max Beckmann, marked by his experience as a wartime medical orderly, made many such searching self-portraits. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Self-Portrait with a Cigarette captures the disabused mood of New Objectivity in Weimar Germany - the painter confronting himself and his viewer with blunt, almost confrontational candor, a tough, modern image of a man who had seen too much and refused to look away.