Max Beckmann

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Max Beckmann, (b. February 12, 1884 in Leipzig, Germany, d. December 28, 1950 in New York City), was a German painter, draftsman, graphic artist, sculptor, writer and thinker. He is usually classified as an Expressionist artist, although during his lifetime he rejected both the term and the movement.

1 Life
2 Themes and Techniques
3 Beckmann today
4 Books
5 External links

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Life

From its onset 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. From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. Transformed by the traumatic experiences of World War I, in which he served, he transformed his style from an academically correct depiction to a distortion of both figure and space, finding new means for his altered vision of himself and humanity.

He is exceptional for the self-portraits he painted throughout his life, the number of them being rivalled only by Rembrandt and Picasso. Well-read in philosophy and literature, he also contemplated mysticism and theosophy in search of the Self. As a true painter-thinker, he strove to find the hidden spiritual dimension in his subjects.

In the Twenties, Beckmann enjoyed great success, being officially honored by the Weimar Republic. However, he fell foul of Hitler's dislike of Modern Art. In 1933, the Nazi government 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 and Brooklyn Museum. He suffered from angina pectoris and died after Christmas 1950, struck down by an apoplexy on 61st Street/Central Park West downtown Manhattan.

His late works mirror the landscapes, skyscrapers and the populace of mid-century America. Many of the paintings are now displayed in American museums. Max Beckmann, a native of the very heart of Germany, exerted a profound influence on such American painters as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.

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Themes and Techniques

Many of Max Beckmann‘s paintings make specific reference to the particular agonies of modern times. He shows the grim as well as the glamorous world of Europe in the Twenties, with obvious yet mythologised reference to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate.

Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting. He took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting, following its technical and spiritual masters, Van Gogh, Blake, Rembrandt, Rubens and the Magic Realists of the late Middle Ages, such as Bosch, Brueghel and Grünewald. Encompassing portraiture, landscape, still life, mythological compositions and the fantastic, his work created a very personal but authentic version of modernism, combining this with traditional plasticity. Above all, 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.”

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Beckmann today

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) and Munich (2000). 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.

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. His essays, plays and, above all, his diaries are also unique historical documents. A selection of Beckmann's writings was issued in America in 1996.

In 2001, Stephan Reimertz, Parisian novelist and art historian, published the biography of Max Beckmann. It presents many photos and sources for the first time. The biography reveals Beckmann's contemplations on writers and philosophers such as Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner. The book has not yet been translated into English.

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