Max Beckmann's prescient vision of the Gahanist inner circle is stunningly accurate. How did he know?

And how did that chihuahua get into Bird's Hell?

Vision of hell: Max Beckmann (The Economist)

​There’s a reason the German artist’s “Hölle der Vögel” (“Bird’s Hell”) is known as Germany’s “Guernica”. Painted in 1937-38, it has vicious plumed birds, huge loudspeakers, a screeching figure giving the Nazi salute and a desperate man whose naked back is being scored with a knife.

Great injuries to the soul can do this to a man.

Max Beckmann (The Art Story)

After enduring a "great injury to his soul" during World War I, Max Beckmann channeled his experience of modern life into expressive images that haunt the viewer with their intensity of emotion and symbolism. Despite his early leanings toward academicism and Expressionism, he became one of the main artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement and created scathing visual critiques of the tumultuous interwar period. In later works, Beckmann strove toward open-ended stories that juxtaposed scenes from reality, dreams, myths, and fables. Throughout his career, he firmly opposed the turn toward abstract art and maintained his desire to "get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting." Beckmann's prowess at subtly layering figures and signs, as well as color and shadow, allowed him to successfully translate his reality into mesmerizing narrative paintings throughout his prolific career.

I'd like to know more, and will.

"My heart beats more for a rougher, commoner, more vulgar art...one that offers direct access to the terrible, the crude, the magnificent, the ordinary, the grotesque and the banal in life. An art that can always be right there for us, in the realest things of life."-- Max Beckmann