Today apparently marks the one hundred and eighteenth anniversary of the first occasion on which dinner jackets were worn in America (at the Autumn Ball at Tuxedo Park, New York, to be precise). And that is the threadbare pretext for this week’s choice of picture, which is, for my money, the most impressive painting of a man in evening dress to be found in an American art gallery. The painting in question is Max Beckmann’s truculent and statuesque Self-Portrait in a Tuxedo, which can be seen at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, attached to Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Beckmann painted the picture in 1927, when he was in his mid-forties and was well established as one of the leading German avant-garde painters of his time. It was, he felt, a particularly propitious moment in his life. Beckmann had served as a medical orderly with the German army in the First World War, suffering a breakdown in 1915, and had spent much of the following decade exorcising his wartime experiences in a series of fractured, troubled allegories of man’s inhumanity to man. But in early 1924 he had met his second wife and lifelong companion Mathilde Kaulbach – Quappi, as he affectionately nicknamed her – and had become suddenly reinvigorated. His energies, he wrote to a friend, were “increased tenfold due to the considerably improved personal situation in which I now live, and I have more intensity and freshness than ever before in my life.” In another letter of the time he wrote, exultantly, that “My will is now free and condensed into further powers that I find almost uncanny. My greatest works are yet to come!!!”

Self-Portrait in a Tuxedo is a picture thoroughly suffused with the artist’s exuberant sense of his own powers. He confronts the viewer in...

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