Max Beckmann

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(b Leipzig, 12 Feb 1884; d New York, 27 Dec 1950). German painter, draughtsman, printmaker and teacher. He was one of the most important German painters of the 20th century. He was initially influenced by traditional styles, but during World War I he rejected perspective and classical proportion in favour of a more expressive objective art. He was persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s but continued to work, painting his celebrated secular triptychs in the late 1930s and the 1940s.

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The German painter and graphic artist Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was one of the towering personalities of figurative expressionist art. His work is characterized by a sculptural monumentality, a vibrant use of color, and a profoundly philosophical outlook.

Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig, the son of a flour merchant. By the age of 14 Max was painting seriously. He attended the Weimar Academy (1900-1903) and then went to Berlin to study. He was influenced by the German impressionism of Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. In 1906, just before leaving for Italy on a scholarship, Beckmann married a fellow student. His Great Death Scene (1906), a painting clearly influenced by Edvard Munch, reflects the death of Beckmann's mother.

Back in Berlin, Beckmann visited the 1907 exhibition of Eugène Delacroix's paintings and produced a number of comparable large-scale works. He was also influenced by the monumental compositions of Peter Paul Rubens, as in the Sinking of the Titanic (1912). Beckmann's works of this kind were very successful, and the "German Delacroix" had exhibitions in Frankfurt and Magdeburg in 1911-1912. By 1914 Beckmann had apparently become aware of a new tension of the picture space, but his color was still quite conservative.

World War I

In 1914 Beckmann volunteered as a medical corpsman and was sent to the Russian front. In early 1915 he was transferred to a hospital in Flanders, where he daily experienced the horrors of operative procedures. By summer he was completely exhausted and was discharged from the army.

Beckmann went to Frankfurt, where his art now moved in an entirely new direction, expressing tension, loneliness, and disillusionment. His Self-Portrait with Red Scarf (1917) is a far cry from his confident early selfportraits. This is a man against the world, portrayed in a constricted space, the figure arranged with deliberate angularity within the picture frame. The landscapes of the period show a Munch-like isolationism.

Style between the Wars

Beckmann's style in the immediate postwar period appears to have been affected primarily by German Gothic art. Its compressed space was well suited to his increasingly philosophical and poetic compositions. The powerful color and roughhewn forms of the Gothic also appealed to Beckmann. Among the paintings of this period the most important is Night (1918-1919). In this work Beckmann moves toward protest, a protest against the violence, hunger, and rioting that became typical of this period just before inflation set in. As a prophecy of the violence of the Nazi period soon to follow, Night is one of the most disturbing works ever painted. It has a dreamlike reality that has been termed "magic realism." During the early 1920s Beckmann played a leading role in the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, in which the artist depicted in the greatest detail and clarity his own emotions and the world around him without direct comment.

In 1925 Beckmann became a professor at the Städel Institute in Frankfurt. He married for the second time; his wife, Mathilde von Kaulbach, was the daughter of the famous Munich portrait painter. In 1928 there was an elaborate retrospective of Beckmann's work in Mannheim. Other exhibitions were held throughout Germany, with the National Gallery in Berlin dedicating a room to his paintings. During the late 1920s and early 1930s Beckmann's art took on a more mellow quality under the influence of contemporary French painting - Beckmann had a studio in Paris and spent the winters there. Without losing any of its symbolic and poetic quality, his work became more distinctly esthetic under the influence of painters like Henri Matisse.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they dismissed Beckmann from his position at the Städel and listed him as a "degenerate" artist. He moved to Berlin, where he lived until 1937. His greatest achievements of this period were large-scale triptychs like the Departure (1932-1935), the first in a series that he continued to execute for the rest of his life. This triptych is a poetic and allegorical comment on man's inhumanity to man, an oblique but still poignant reference to the physical and psychological tortures of the era and the ultimate liberation and triumph of the human spirit.

The Beckmanns fled to Amsterdam, where they preferred to remain unnoticed and maintained contact with very few people. Beckmann's diary for this period is filled with references to the lack of heat, proper food, and light and to endless air raids. He continued to paint, and the great Blind Man's Buff triptych (1945) is one of the most elaborate and complex works of a period in which Beckmann did five of these magnificent and powerful poetic compositions. Blind Man's Buff appears to be an allegory of the relationship between man and woman and the gods who control their lives.

Last Years

With the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, Beckmann had an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The next year he had a major exhibition at the Curt Valentin gallery in New York City. In 1947 he accepted an invitation to teach at Washington University in St. Louis. The following year the City Art Museum of St. Louis gave him a retrospective, which brought him the highest acclaim in the art world. In 1949 Beckmann received first prize at the Carnegie International and taught at the Brooklyn Art Museum. In the summer of 1950 he died in New York.

Further Reading

There are no monographs on Beckmann in English. The best material in English is in two exhibition catalogs and a general survey: City Art Museum, St. Louis, Max Beckmann, with an introduction by Perry T. Rathbone (1948); Museum of Modern Art, New York, Max Beckmann, with an introduction by Peter Selz (1964); and Bernard S. Myers, The German Expressionists: A Generation in Revolt (1957; concise ed. 1963). A specialized study is Charles S. Kessler, Max Beckmann's Triptychs (1970).

Additional Sources

Lackner, Stephan, Max Beckmann, New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977.

Beckmann, Max (Leipzig, 1884-1950, New York), a painter who is best known for his early work which demonstrates the absurdity of war and modern society's alienation from a meaningful existence. He did not belong to any movement, and although some of his work is close to Expressionism (see Expressionismus), he himself thought it apt that his objective, factual, and precise style, begun about 1917, came to be associated with Neue Sachlichkeit. It derived from his traumatic experience as a medical orderly during the early stage of the war, first in East Prussia, then, until his discharge in 1915, in a typhoid hospital in Flanders. In the mid-1920s he turned to French Modernism and until his dismissal in 1933 held a chair of art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. During the next years he lived in Berlin. In 1937 he emigrated to Amsterdam, and in 1947 to the USA, teaching at St Louis until his professorial appointment at the Brooklyn Museum in the year before his death. His later work includes large triptychs on mythological themes, the graphic cycle Die Apokalypse (1943), and a set of illustrations to Goethe's Faust (Part Two, 1957). A second edition of his diaries, Tagebücher 1940-50, and his letters, Briefe im Kriege, appeared in 1955.

Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann Self-portrait with Horn, 1938-1940
Born	February 12, 1884(1884-02-12)
Died	December 28, 1950 (aged 66)
Nationality	German
Field	Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Printmaking

Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement.^[1] In the 1920s he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism.

Contents 1 Life 2 Themes and techniques 3 Beckmann's legacy 4 Notes 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Life

He was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony. From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. His traumatic experiences of World War I, in which he served as a medic, coincided with a dramatic transformation of his style from academically correct depictions to a distortion of both figure and space, reflecting his altered vision of himself and humanity.^[2]

He is known for the self-portraits painted throughout his life, their number and intensity 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. (Beckmann's 1948 "Letters to a Woman Painter" provides a statement of his approach to art.)

In the Weimar Republic of the Thirties, Beckmann enjoyed great success and official honors. In 1937 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf; the National Gallery in Berlin acquired his painting The Bark and, in 1928, purchased his Self-Portrait in Tuxedo.^[3] In 1925 he was selected to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt. Some of his most famous students included Theo Garve, Leo Maillet and Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky.

His fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state. In 1933, the Nazi government bizarrely called Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik"^[4] and dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums, and several of these works were put on display in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.^[5] 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. In 1944 the Germans attempted to draft him into the army, despite the fact that the sixty-year-old artist had suffered a heart attack. The works completed in his 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 the United States, 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. He suffered from angina pectoris and died after Christmas 1950, struck down by a heart attack in Manhattan.^[6]

Many of his late paintings are displayed in American museums. Max Beckmann, a native of the very heart of Germany, exerted a profound influence on such American painters as Philip Guston and Nathan Oliveira.^[7]

Themes and techniques

Max Beckmann oil on canvas triptych Carnival, 1943

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. Many of Max Beckmann‘s paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic's cabaret culture, but from the Thirties on, his works often contain mythologized references 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; instead, he took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting. He greatly admired Cézanne, but also Van Gogh, Blake, Rembrandt, Rubens and Northern European artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance such as Bosch, Bruegel and Matthias Grünewald. Encompassing portraiture, landscape, still life, mythology and the fantastic, his work created a very personal but authentic version of modernism, combining this with traditional plasticity. Beckmann reinvented the triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into a looking glass of contemporary humanity.

Beckmann's legacy

Beckmann's posthumous reputation perhaps suffered from his very individual artistic path; like Oskar Kokoschka, he defies the convenient categorization that provides themes for critics, art historians and curators. 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—which holds the largest public collection of Beckmann paintings in the world—(1998/1999), Munich (2000), Frankfurt (2006) and Amsterdam (2007). In Spain and Italy, Beckmann's work has been accessible to a wider public for the first time. A large-scale Beckmann retrospective was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002[1] and the Tate Modern in London in 2003.[2]

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[3] was issued in America in 1996.

In 2003, 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, and Richard Wagner. The book has not yet been translated into English.

Notes

1. ^ Max Beckmann
2. ^ Schulz-Hoffmann and Weiss, Max Beckmann: Retrospective. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 0-393-01937-3, 1984, p.69.
3. ^ Rainbird, 2003, p. 272.
4. ^ Beckmann
5. ^ Rainbird, 2003, p. 274.
6. ^ Rainbird, 2003, p. 283.
7. ^ Schulz-Hoffmann and Weiss, Max Beckmann: Retrospective. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 0-393-01937-3 1984, pp. 161-162.

See also

• Expressionism
• Western painting
• New objectivity

References

• von Erffa, Hans Martin (ed.): Göpel, Barbara und Erhard (1976). Max Beckmann : Katalog der Gemälde. (2 vls) Bern.
• Hofmaier, James (1990). Max Beckmann: Catalogue raisonné of his Prints. (2 vls) Bern.
• von Wiese, Stephan (1978). Max Beckmann : Das zeichnerische Werk 1903 – 1925. Düsseldorf.
• Reimertz, Stephan (2003). Max Beckmann: Biography. Munich.
• Belting, Hans (1989). Max Beckmann: Tradition as a Problem of Modern Art. Preface by Peter Selz. New York.
• Lackner, Stephan (1969). Max Beckmann : Memoirs of a Friendship. Coral Gables.
• Lackner, Stephan (1977). Max Beckmann. New York.
• Michalski, Sergiusz (1994). New Objectivity. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-9650-0
• Rainbird, Sean, ed. (2003). Max Beckmann. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0-87070-241-6
• Schulz-Hoffmann, Carla; Weiss, Judith C. (1984). Max Beckmann: Retrospective. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 0-393-01937-3
• Selz, Peter (1964). Max Beckmann. New York.

External links

• Max Beckmann School including information in English
• Works by the artist at "Musuemsportal Schleswig-Holstein"
• Max Beckmann at Richard Nagy Gallery
• Max Beckmann in Amsterdam, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, 13 September 2007 – 6 January 2008
• Max Beckmann — The Watercolours and Pastels, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, 3 March – 28 May 2006
• Max Beckmann: "Departure" from Artchive
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Information on Kirchner and the German Expressionist movement
• MaxBeckmann.com, Homage site.
• Max Beckmann at Burda Museum

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