Max Beckmann

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Max Beckmann. Beckmann Family. Oil on canvas.

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.

1 Life and Times
2 Themes and Techniques
3 Beckmann today
4 Literature

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Life and Times

From its onset in the fin de siècle up to its completion after World War II, Beckmann's work reflects an entire era of catastrophes, revolutions, and radical changes in both art and history.

From his early years, the son of a middle-class of Lower Saxon family origin tried to compete with the old masters. Struck by the experience of the war, he radically reduced his style, trying to find a new, honest and passionate image of himself and the human being. No one besides Rembrandt and Picasso completed so many self-portraits. Beckmann was always in search of a Self. Well-read in philosophy and literature, he also contemplated mysticism and theosophy. As a true painter-thinker, he tried to visualize the hidden spiritual worlds in every subject.

In the Twenties, Max Beckmann was officially honored by the Weimar Republic and considered one of the most eminent German artists. In 1933, the Nazi government fired 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 chose Amsterdam as a place of exile, desperately trying to obtain a visa for the US. Nevertheless, the works completed in his small Amsterdam studio were even more powerful and intense than the ones of his master years in Frankfurt. Above all, Beckmann reinvented the triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into a looking glass of contemporary humanity.

During the last three years of his life, Beckmann taught at the art schools of Washington University in St Louis and Brooklyn Museum. The artist 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 Northern German, exerted a profound influence on such American painters as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. Likewise, his sincere devotion to art, his example as a creator and teacher has impressed and inspired generations of artists, and it still impresses us today.

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Themes and Techniques

Many of Max Beckmann‘s paintings, however, seem to make specific reference to the particular agonies of modern times. We can find the grim as well as glamorous world of Europe in the Twenties; the brutalities and degradations perpetrated by the Nazis; the silent closeness of underground conspirators. But his subjects and symbols have larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror and destruction, bewilderment and frustration, faith and belief, love and hate and the mysteries of eternity, fate and dualism.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting. In his clear and purified abstraction, he never challenged the concrete object; thus becoming one of the most sympathetic portraitists of his century. In keeping with the tradition of the technical and spiritual masters of painting, Beckmann took up the heritage of Van Gogh, Blake, Rembrandt, Rubens and the Magic Realists of the late Middle Ages, such as Bosch, Brueghel and Grünewald. The artist created a very personal but genuine version of modernism. Very few painters other than Beckmann were able to combine tradition and modern art.

According to New York art dealer Richard L Feigen, Max Beckmann can be described 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 greater international reputation than ever. 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) have welcomed hundreds of thousands of spectators. 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. His lively and genuine style ranks him among the strongest writers of the German tongue. Also Beckmann's essays, plays and above all his diaries have been recognized as unique historical documents. Beckmann's writings are creations in their own right, and full of wit, vision and poetry.

In addition, many scholarly publications, both in Germany and the US, have confirmed the significance of Max Beckmann as one of the masters of modern art. However, nearly all of these publications are either scholarly essays, dissertations or illustrated folios. A selection of Beckmann's writings, issued in the US in 1996, has shown the increasing popularity of the artist in America. Unfortunately, the translation is full of mistakes. The English edition of Hans Belting's brief thesis on Beckmann and modernism may be the most interesting publication on Beckmann in America.

In 2001, Stephan Reimertz, novelist and art historian from Paris, put out the first biography of Max Beckmann; it is the life story of one of the great artists and of a century, a chronicle of fifty years of western civilization and a panorama of modern art. The style of the book is as sober and clear, as bright and colorful as Beckmann's paintings. It shows the intellectual and artistic development of an unparalleled spirit and presents many photos and sources in for the first time. The work can be read as a narrative or used as a general reference source. It has been labeled a standard guide like John Richardson's »Picasso«.

The book discusses the chief topics of modern art; e.g. non-representational painting vs. abstraction, abstraction vs. figurative art, etc. It focuses on the crucial movements in art and in art theory, and it also portrays many of Beckmann's contemporaries, such as Max Liebermann, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, Gottfried Benn a.m.o. Beckmann was a devoted reader and writer, and so the biography reveals his contemplations on writers and philosophers like Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner. How did his reading and thinking influence his art? As a painter, Beckmann often referred to the old masters, so the author takes a glance at his relationship with artists like Rembrandt, Rubens, Manet and Cézanne. Finally, the biography examines Beckmann’s influence on artists in America and Europe. The book reveals Beckmann not only as a great artist, but also as a original thinker, a talented writer, a truthful witness of the century and last but not least as an decent human being. Unfortunately, this major work of modern art history has not yet been translated into English.