Max Beckmann Still Life with Three Skulls. 1945. Oil on canvas. 21 3/4 x 35 1/4". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. Culver Orswell. ©1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst

Pablo Picasso. Studio with Plaster Head. 1925. Oil on canvas. 38 5/8 x 51 5/8". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. ©1997 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

	In this century, the still life has found a relevance that repudiates the dictionary definition of the genre: "the depiction of inanimate objects or material goods." Although presumably defined by convention, and seemingly removed from political or historical concerns, during the 1930s and ’40s the still life became for many artists a privileged theme through which they channeled both their personal anxieties and terrors and the disturbing, even apocalyptic sense of unrest that pervaded a period of economic depression, political instability, and war. The centuries-old genre of the vanitas or memento mori—which usually includes a human skull, often paired with books, candles, or domestic objects—reappears here in, for example, Max Beckmann’s Still Life with Three Skulls, 1945, which groups skulls with playing cards and liquor bottles, producing a nightmarish intensity.