Expressionist painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, born in Leipzig, EC Germany. He trained at Weimar, and in 1904 moved to Berlin where he began painting large-scale, dramatic works. The suffering he witnessed as a hospital orderly in World War 1 led him to develop a highly individual style influenced by Gothic art, which he used to give voice to the disillusionment he saw around him in post-war Germany. When he learnt that his work was to be included in an exhibition of Degenerate Art to be mounted by the Nazis in 1937, he fled to Holland, where he lived until emigrating to the USA in 1947.
December 28, 1950 in New York City), was a German painter, draftsman, graphic artist, sculptor, writer and thinker.Life
From its beginnings in the fin de siècle up to its completion after World War II, Beckmann's work reflects an era of radical changes in both art and history.
He was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony.
He is exceptional for the self-portraits he painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivalled only by Rembrandt and Picasso. (Beckmann's 1948 "Letters to a Woman Painter" is a fascinating late statement of his approach to art.)
In the Twenties, Beckmann enjoyed great success, being officially honored by the Weimar Republic. In 1933, the Nazi government bizarrely called him a "cultural Bolshevik", dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt, and showed some of his works in the notorious 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. For ten years, Beckmann lived in poverty in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam, failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the US. The works completed in his small Amsterdam studio were even more powerful and intense than the ones of his master years in Frankfurt, and included several large triptychs, which stand as a summation of Beckmann's art.
After the war, Beckmann moved to America, and during the last three years of his life, he taught at the art schools of Washington University in St. Louis (with the German-American painter and printmaker Werner Drewes) and the Brooklyn Museum.
His late works mirror the landscapes, skyscrapers and the populace of mid-century America. Max Beckmann, a native of the very heart of Germany, exerted a profound influence on such American painters as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.
Themes and techniques
Many of Max Beckmann‘s paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century.
Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting. Beckmann reinvented the triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into a looking glass of contemporary humanity.
New York art dealer Richard L Feigen described him as “the greatest artist of the 20th Century in Germany — if not in the world.”
Beckmann's legacy
Beckmann's posthumous reputation perhaps suffered from his very individual artistic path; Other than a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964-65 (with an excellent catalogue by Peter Selz), and MoMA's prominent display of the triptych "Departure", his work was little seen in America for decades. His 1984 centenary was marked in the New York area only by a modest exhibit at Nassau County's suburban art museum. But in recent years, Max Beckmann's work has gained an increasing international reputation. There have been retrospectives and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (1995) and the Guggenheim Museum (1996) in New York, and the principal museums of Rome (1996), Valencia (1996), Madrid (1997), Zurich (1998), St Louis (1998/1999), Munich (2000) and Frankfurt (2006). In Spain and Italy, Beckmann's work has been accessible to a wider public for the first time. In 2001, a large-scale Beckmann retrospective took place at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London.
In 1996, Piper, Beckmann's German publisher, released the third and last volume of the artist’s letters, whose wit and vision rank him among the strongest writers of the German tongue. A selection of Beckmann's writings was issued in America in 1996.
In 2003, Stephan Reimertz, Parisian novelist and art historian, published the biography of Max Beckmann. The biography reveals Beckmann's contemplations on writers and philosophers such as Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner.
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