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(1884-1950)
See also: Expressionism; "Beckmann: Departure"
"There are few German painters who have had as long and
distinguished a career as Max Beckmann, and fewer still who
have been able to sustain the consistent level of excellence he
maintained throughout his career. Some, such as August
Macke and Franz Marc, had their lives cut tragically short
while serving in war, while others, such as Otto Dix, George
Grosz, and Christian Schad, were unable to regain their
creative edge following Nazi persecution. Beckmann not only
survived such misfortunes but excelled in spite of them.
Between 1905 and 1950, he created more than eight hundred
paintings and produced hundreds of prints and drawings, a
phenomenal output under any circumstances, and even more
considerable when one realizes the challenges that faced him
during the height of his career. Persecuted by the Nazis, he
was forced to flee his homeland and work in relative isolation
while the war turned Europe upside down.
"A painter's painter, he eschewed identification with a
particular school or style. His oeuvre is a celebration of
painting's grand traditions - the still life, the portrait, history
painting, and allegorical and mythological subjects - articulated
in a visual style that has often been described as Expressionist.
But while his frenetic brushwork and highly complex,
metaphysical iconography have much in common with German
Expressionism, Beckmann's paintings never succumbed to the
Modernist tendency to render the world abstractly. In his 1938
lecture "On My Painting," Beckmann explained: 'I hardly need
to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so
unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.'...
"Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884, the youngest of
three children. His father, a grain merchant, died when
Beckmann was only ten years old. By the age of fifteen, after
several years of boarding school and over his family's
objections, he decided that his destiny lay as a painter. After
failing the entrance exam for the Königliche Akademie der
Bildenden Künste in Dresden, Beckmann was accepted by the
Grossherzogliche Sächsische Kunstschule in Weimar in 1900.
The school provided him with an academic art education,
whereby he learned to draw from antique sculpture as well as from live models. At school, he met Minna Tube, a
fellow artist whom he married in 1906 and who gave birth to
his only child, Peter.
"After completing his studies in 1903, Beckmann made the
first of many trips to Paris, the city that to him represented the
peak of artistic accomplishment. The political upheaval caused
by two world wars, however, would prevent him from ever
realizing his goal of permanently settling and pursuing his art
there.
"By 1906, Beckmann had become an accomplished
painter. After moving to Berlin, he participated in exhibitions
with the Berlin Secession, the predominant voice of Modern
German painting at the time. Like the works by its senior
members - Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, and Max Slevogt - Beckmann's paintings from this period are characterized by
the legacy of Impressionism, with landscapes and beach
scenes rendered in stippled brushstrokes to evoke the play of light across forms. He was held in such
high regard by his colleagues that, in 1910, he was elected to
the executive board of the Secession, becoming the youngest
member ever to achieve such a distinction. Preferring art
making to policy making, however, he resigned the following
year in order to devote himself full-time to painting.
"In the years leading up to World War I, Beckmann's
work evolved into grand compositions of religious and
mythical subjects in the tradition of Eugène Delacroix, Peter
Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van Rijn. The war interrupted
his work, however, and after serving as a medical volunteer
for a year, he suffered a breakdown and was discharged to
Frankfurt in 1915 to recuperate. When he began to paint
again in earnest in 1917, his style changed radically, assuming
a Northern Gothic sensibility couched in a Modern idiom.
His forms became more mannered and polished; his colors became more intense, and his rendering of
space took on a vaguely Cubist orientation, with figures
compressed into torturous settings and angular forms tilting
precariously toward the picture plane. His works became a
mosaic of contemporary social criticism and religious or
mythical themes, and he increasingly used masked or
costumed circus characters as allegorical figures, a practice
that became a hallmark of his art.
"By the mid-1920s, Beckmann had become one of
Germany's foremost Modern painters. His work was hailed
as a leading example of Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity), a short-lived movement distinguished by the
rejection of Expressionism and the revival of realism. Often
cynical in its outlook, Neue Sachlichkeit moved away from
the subjectivity of Expressionist emotion and chronicled the
bourgeois excesses of Weimar culture with a frighteningly
detached demeanor. While Beckmann certainly engaged in social criticism in his work during this period, he
did so in a broader context than other artists associated with
Neue Sachlichkeit, such as Dix and Grosz, continuing to
confront metaphysical issues in his paintings.
"In 1925, Beckmann was appointed to teach at the
Kunstgewerbeschule of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in
Frankfurt, a position he held until 1933. Also in 1925, he
divorced Minna Tube and married Mathilde (Quappi) von
Kaulbach, who became the subject of many of his important
paintings. The following year, he had his first solo exhibition
in the United States, at J. B. Neumann's New Art Circle
gallery in New York, thereby expanding his reputation in the
international art community. With several distinguished
publications devoted to his art already in circulation,
Beckmann was accorded a large retrospective exhibition in
1928 at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, organized by its director,
G. F. Hartlaub (the originator of the term Neue Sachlichkeit). That same year, Beckmann received one
of the nation's highest honors in the fine arts, and a gold medal
from the city of Düsseldorf in recognition of his artistic
achievements. In 1930, a permanent gallery for Beckmann's
art was established at the Städtische Galerie of the
Städelsches Kunstinstitut. Two years later, he received
further distinction when a room was dedicated in his honor at
the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and ten major works by him were
placed there on permanent display.
"With Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933,
Beckmann's good fortune, and that of German political and
cultural life in general, abruptly declined. The Nazis viewed
Modern art as socially and morally corrupt, and they began to
purge Germany's cultural institutions of everything they
perceived to be weakening the fiber of the country's heritage.
Beckmann's work, along with that of many artists held in high
regard today, was suddenly labeled 'degenerate.'
"Art dealers who had supported Beckmann now shied away
from him or left the country fearing Nazi persecution.
Beckmann's art was methodically removed from German
museums, and by 1937, nearly six hundred of his works had
been confiscated. That July, following Hitler's radio broadcast
at the opening of the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition - the
Nazi propaganda exercise that definitively extinguished the
avant-garde in Germany - Beckmann fled with his wife to live
with her sister in Amsterdam, never to return again. It was an
abrupt and humiliating transition for an artist who had been
hailed only four years earlier as a national treasure.
"For the next ten years, Beckmann worked largely alone,
except for the company of his wife and a few close friends,
using a large tobacco storeroom as his studio. The outbreak of
war in Europe confined him to Amsterdam, except for
occasional sojourns to Paris or the Dutch countryside.
"Beckmann's diaries from these years are replete with
accounts of his frequent visits to cabarets, carnivals, and
the theater. On one level, these distractions offered
temporary relief from the horrors of the war, the tragedies of
which nonetheless found their way into his art. On another
level, however, Beckmann regarded them as allegories of
human existence. Thus, his paintings from these years - some
of the most important works of his career - are abundant with
subjects whose identity is both constructed and obscured by
masquerade. Indeed, three of the triptychs, Akrobaten
(Acrobats, 1939),Schauspieler (Actors, 1941-42), and Karneval (Carnival, 1942-43), make specific reference to these genres, offering grand
theatricalizations of human tragedy rather than celebrating the
lighthearted pleasure such spectacles usually elicit.
"In the war's aftermath, Beckmann immigrated to the United States, where he taught and painted during the last
three years of his life. By this time, he had found widespread
acceptance as a major force in twentieth-century art. When
he died in December 1950, he had just finished Argonauten
(The Argonauts, 1949-50), the ninth of the
monumental triptychs that distinguish his mature career. His
studio contained several unfinished canvases-including a tenth
triptych - testifying to the boundless creative energy that he
possessed in spite of his failing health."
- From Matthew Drutt, Introduction to the catalog, "Max Beckmann in Exile"
Further reading on Max Beckmann:
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