Adam and Eve

Narrator:

Adam and Eve is a well-known motif in art.

Towards the end of the 19th century, and well into modernism, it had a kind of renaissance so-to-speak...

The image of man and woman symbolises the ideal notion of love, but it also contains conflicting feelings about the body, sexuality, desire, anxiety and unrest.

The biblical story of the fall that occurs to Adam and Eve becomes an underlying symbol of everything that can disrupt the idyllic dream

In the German artist Max Beckmann’s Adam and Eve, the couple has left the idyllic dream.

Desire has taken over their bodies, and there is no way back...

At the beginning of the First World War, Beckmann enlisted and assisted with medical help. His time on the battlefield was cut short after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1915 due to the horrors of the war that he was exposed to.

In the period that followed, he created a series of powerful works, depicting disillusionment, inner turmoil, and hopelessness in an expressionist style.

Beckmann was inspired by the figurativeness of the old masters from the Renaissance and the late Middle Ages.

He held on to this figurative style despite the fact that his fellow artists at that time were exploring a more abstract form of expression.