About this online exhibition

Welcome to this online exhibition, a space where images, history, and personal interpretation meet. My hope is that these pieces not only explain the artworks but also open space for thinking about visibility, fragility, and what it means to claim a place within a collective “we.”

Images, history, and personal interpretation

This website brings together two artworks created in different eras and under different pressures—Josef Breitenbach’s We New Yorkers and Max Beckmann’s Frauenbad (1919)—yet both works ask the same question: What does it mean to live inside a society that is changing faster than the people within it?

Vulnerability, identity, and resistance

Through my essays, I explore how images can reveal vulnerability, identity, and resistance. Breitenbach, a refugee artist in 1940s New York, created a photomontage where a glowing nervous-system body stands before a grid of city lights. I read this figure as both connected to and exposed within the civic “we.” It reflects the complicated belonging of immigrants—wired into a new city yet still fragile, still waiting to be accepted.

The weight of historical memory

Beckmann’s Frauenbad, painted in post–World War I Germany, shows a crowded bathhouse full of tension and distortion. Instead of comfort, the scene exposes the exhaustion and instability of a society recovering from trauma. I argue that Beckmann uses discomfort as a form of resistance, rejecting idealized beauty to reveal the psychological and social pressures of the Weimar era.

"Identity is shaped by the systems around us—political, social, and emotional."

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