Adam and Eve (Adam und Eva)

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Adam and Eve (Adam und Eva)

Edition: From edition of 5 executed at the Roman Foundry, New York; cast from the original plaster that Beckmann brought to the US in 1947
Germany, 1936, cast after 1950
Sculpture
Bronze
33 1/2 × 13 1/8 × 14 1/2 in. (85.09 × 33.34 × 36.83 cm)
Gift of Robert Gore Rifkind (AC1999.16.1)
Currently on public view:
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

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Label

Adam and Eve, a meditation on sin, free will, and the origins of suffering, reflects Max Beckmann’s interest in biblical subjects as well as the artist’s own threatened circumstances in Nazi Ge...
Adam and Eve, a meditation on sin, free will, and the origins of suffering, reflects Max Beckmann’s interest in biblical subjects as well as the artist’s own threatened circumstances in Nazi Germany. In Beckmann’s depiction, Adam is immobilized by the snake while Eve is curled against his chest, referencing her “birth” from one of Adam’s ribs. Beckmann, dismissed from his teaching post in Frankfurt by the Nazis in 1933, would flee to Amsterdam in 1937. His sculptures, eight in total, were cast in bronze and editioned after the artist’s death in 1950.

Wall label, 2021.
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