Max Beckmann’s Die Walküre (“The Valkyrie”) is exemplary of the dialogue this exhibition stages. One of the first works he painted after arriving in the United States in 1948, it depicts Beckmann’s first wife Minna Tube, who was an opera singer, as the lead in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre. The eponymous painting of a warrior opera singer was an emancipated portrait of a woman for the time.

United States-based artists Cecily Brown, Ella Kruglyanskaya and Dana Schutz, who have each been great admirers of Max Beckmann since the beginning of their careers, respond here to the work of that “most German of all painters,” as Beckmann was often called abroad. We are incredibly grateful to the institutional and private collection loans that have made this dialogue between Beckmann and three of the most exciting painters working today possible.