Art, literature & history
Happy New Year 1917
1917
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Medium
- drypoint
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 29.8 x 37 cm (11 3/4 x 14 9/16 in.); Plate: 24.2 x 29.8 cm (9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.)
- Collection no.
- 1975.53
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
Max Beckmann. Happy New Year 1917. Max Beckmann; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
About this artwork
Happy New Year 1917 — Max Beckmann. 1917.
Medium: drypoint. Dimensions: Sheet: 29.8 x 37 cm (11 3/4 x 14 9/16 in.); Plate: 24.2 x 29.8 cm (9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.).
Collection record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
This closely packed image portrays a mix of people at a holiday party. A skeleton-like war veteran with a patched eye is just one of several inebriated patrons whose celebration of a new year, Beckmann implies, is pure folly. The artist often worked in drypoint, a method of directly scratching a plate to create an image that, when inked, retains a velvety burr around the lines. The technique allowed him to work spontaneously, similar to sketching with a pen on paper.
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.