  |
|
|
Max Beckmann
Leipzig, 1884-New York, 1950
Max Beckmann was one of the most important German artists of the twentieth-century. Independent and solitary, he developed a figurative and Expressionist style with a completely individual pictorial language, distinct from any of his contemporaries.
From 1900-1903 Beckmann studied at the Kunstschule in Weimar where plein air painting was encouraged. He then studied in Paris for one year where he was looked after and encouraged by the art historian Julius Meier Graefe. In Paris he encountered the works of the Impressionists and discovered Cézanne and Van Gogh. From 1904 until World War I he lived in Berlin where he married Minna Tube. Beckmann joined the Berlin Sezession and showed his work in numerous exhibitions.
Beckmann enlisted voluntarily in World War I but was invalided out after a nervous attack and took no further part in the combat. The war heightened his scepticism and disillusionment and his pictorial style became more dramatic. In 1917 he moved to Frankfurt, where years later he would be professor at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. During the 1920s Beckmann painted numerous portraits and self-portraits, figurative works, landscapes and still lifes. In 1925 he exhibited at the Frankfurt Kunstverein and at the prestigious Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin in the exhibition on the New Objectivity movement organised at Mannheim. That same year he married Mathilde von Kaulbach, known to her family as Quappi, who would appear in his works from then on. In 1928 Gustav F. Hartlaub organised an important exhibition of his work at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, and the artist's fame began to grow.
From 1930 Beckmann had a studio in Paris where he spent long periods, although he was never particularly close to the Parisian art scene. With the rise of the Nazi party his life changed and his increasing fame abruptly came to an end. In 1937, the day after the inauguration of the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), in which various of his works were included, Beckmann decided to leave Germany and spent some years in Paris and Amsterdam. In the Dutch city, where he lived as a refugee during World War II, Beckmann made an important series of prints, among which were the lithographs entitled Apocalypse, in which he recorded his personal vision of the state of Europe.
In 1948 the artist moved to America, where he worked as a professor of art in Saint Louis and New York, the city in which he died without ever having returned to his native Germany.
Göpel, E. and Göpel, B.: Max Beckmann: Katalog der Gemälde. 2 vols., Bremen, 1976.
Ohlesen, N.: Max Beckmann sieht Quappi. Exhibition catalogue Kunsthalle Emden, 1999.
Schulz-Hoffmann and Weiss, J. C.: Max Beckmann Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue The Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, 1984.
Vergo, P.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Twentieth-century German Painting. London, 1992.
Artist
works>>
Printer friendly format >>
<<
back
|
Pages related to BECKMANN, Max >>
|
|
|
|
|
