Max Beckmann

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Max Beckmann, a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer, born February 12, 1884 – 1950.

Despite being identified as an Expressionist artist, he opposed both the word and the movement.

He was associated with Neutral Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an expression of Expressionism that condemned its introverted emotionalism in the 1920s.

Life

Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig, Saxony, to a middle-class family. He pitted himself against the old masters from childhood. His traumatic experiences of World War I, in which he served as a medical orderly, coincided with a dramatic change of his style, reflecting his changed vision of himself and humanity.

He is best known for his self-portraits he has created throughout his life, their number and tenacity rivaled only those of Rembrandt and Picasso. Beckmann, who is well-read in philosophy and literature, has also considered mysticism and theosophy in the quest for the "self." He searched for the true artistic dimension in his subjects (Beckmann's 1948 Letters to a Woman Painter gives a glimpse of his art).

During the Weimar Republic, Beckmann enjoyed a lot of success and official recognition. He was chosen to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt in 1925. Theo Garve, Leo Maillet, and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky were among his most popular students. In 1927, he was awarded 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, he purchased his Self-Portrait in Tuxedo. A series of major exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim (1928) and in Basel and Zurich (1930), as well as numerous publications, showed the high esteem in which Beckmann was held by the early 1930s.

Adolf Hitler's ascension to power, as a result of his disdain of Modern Art, his fortunes were stumbling by the state. Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt in 1933 by the Nazi government, who called him a "cultural Bolshevik." More than 500 of his works from German museums were confiscated by the government in 1937, many of which were on display in Munich's legendary Degenerate Art exhibition. Beckmann and his second wife, Quappi, left Germany for the Netherlands the day after Hitler's radio address about degenerate art in 1937.

Beckmann spent ten years in Amsterdam, failing in his vain attempts to obtain a visa for the United States. The Germans tried to draft him into the army in 1944, but the sixty-year-old artist had been wounded in a heart attack. The works in his Amsterdam studio were even more vibrant and detailed than those of his master years in Frankfurt. Several large triptychs were included in the collection, which serve as a summary of Beckmann's art.

Beckmann started training at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University in 1947. He taught at Washington University (alongside German-American painter and printmaker Werner Drewes) and the Brooklyn Museum during the last three years of his life. Perry T. Rathbone, the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, welcomed him to St. Louis. Rathbone arranged for Washington University to recruit Beckmann as an art teacher, filling a vacancy left by Philip Guston, who had been on leave. In 1948, the City Art Museum in Saint Louis hosted the first Beckmann retrospective in the United States. Morton D. May, a St. Louis photographer and painter who is also an avid amateur photographer and painter, became his patron and artist, as well as a student of the artist. Beckmann's works were on display at the St. Louis Art Museum until May later donated a portion of his large collection of Beckmann's works. Beckmann also taught him how to appreciate Oceanian and African art.

He and Quappi took an apartment on 38 West 69th Street in Manhattan after stops in Denver and Chicago. He obtained a professorship at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1949.

Beckmann, who died after Christmas 1950, was struck by a heart attack at the corner of 69th Street and Central Park West in New York City, not far from his apartment building. He was on his way to see one of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the artist's widow recalled. Beckmann's one-man exhibit at the Venice Biennale of 1950, the year of his death, was a one-man show. He created the work Falling Man, which is both a reflection on death and eerily accurate of the jumpers and other injured people who fell from the World Trade Center Towers in 1950.

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