Falling Man
Max Beckmann, 1950
Image not available: work still under copyright
Falling Man is an oil-on-canvas painting by the German artist Max Beckmann, completed in 1950 in New York, during the last year of his life. He had left the Netherlands in 1947 and was living in the United States at the time. The scene shows a man plunging through empty space under a clear blue sky. Viewers later came to see the image as strikingly prophetic of the people who fell or jumped from the World Trade Center towers during the September 11 attacks in New York City, since the setting resembles that bright, cloudless day. Earlier in his work, Beckmann had drawn several falling men for his 1943 to 1944 illustrations of Goethe's Faust II, suggesting that the motif had long held his interest. The painting was included in the 2016 to 2017 exhibition Max Beckmann in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its significance lies largely in this unsettling reading, which turns it into an image of a fall with no visible end.
- Painter
- Max Beckmann
- Date
- 1950
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 141 × 89 cm
- Museum
- Galería Nacional de Arte, Washington, D.C.