Max Beckmann was a German painter and printmaker born in Leipzig in 1884.
Max Beckmann at a glance
- Born: 12 February 1884 in Leipzig, Germany
- Died: 27 December 1950 in New York City
- Nationality: German
- Medium: Painting and printmaking
- Style or Movement: Expressionism, often linked with New Objectivity
- Known for: Dark, crowded figure paintings and triptychs
- Notable works: The triptych “Departure” (1932 to 1933)
- Based in: Frankfurt, then Amsterdam (1937 to 1947), then the United States
“My art can gorge itself here.”
Max Beckmann emerged in Berlin in the early 1910s working in a late Impressionist manner, and he joined the medical corps during World War I, serving in Belgium where he met Erich Heckel before being discharged after a nervous breakdown in 1915.
Max Beckmann’s harrowing experience of war led him to incorporate strategies of distortion, angularity, and exaggerated color, and after the war he settled in Frankfurt, focusing on urban themes, especially the disaffection of postwar society, often depicting life as a theater or circus in tightly compressed compositions.
Max Beckmann made a total of 373 prints, all in black and white, and Max Beckmann preferred the scratchy texture of etching and drypoint, but Max Beckmann also worked in lithography, making only nineteen woodcuts, most of which were issued by leading dealer-publishers like Paul Cassirer and J. B. Neumann.
Max Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching position at Frankfurt’s Städel Art School in 1933 after the Nazis came to power, and more than five hundred of his works were removed from public collections by the Nazis in 1937, the day after many of his works were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition.
- Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1884, died in 1950.
- Served in the medical corps during World War I.
- Known for his enigmatic allegorical paintings.
- Made over 370 prints during his career.
- Fled to Amsterdam in 1937 and later emigrated to the US.
Max Beckmann waited out World War II in Amsterdam, and after the war he assumed teaching positions in St. Louis and New York, and Max Beckmann’s mantra for his students was to work a lot, simplify, use lots of color, and make the painting more personal.
Max Beckmann dreamed up a world of actors, cabaret singers, heroes, and thugs, and Max Beckmann often included himself in the action, identifiable by his enormous head and scowling face, and Max Beckmann resolutely pursued figuration and narrative at a time when many of his contemporaries were experimenting with abstraction.