BECKMANN, Max (Leipzig, 1884 – New York, 1950)
Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig on 12 February 1884 of farmer parents. From 1900 until 1903 Beckmann lived in Weimar and undertook his artistic training at the Kunstschule where he mainly concentrated classical studies and landscape painting. After completing his studies the artist briefly moved to Paris before settling in Berlin where he remained until the beginning of the war, developing an intensively expressive personal style. During that period, Beckmann made his first encounter with German philosophy, approaching the writings of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. In Berlin he also executed his first celebrated works as Young Men by the Sea (1905), acquired in 1906 by the Grossherzogliches Museum für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe of Weimar. That same year Beckmann exhibited both at the 11th edition of the Berlin Secession and at the German Kunstlerbund of Weimar that awarded him a prize which included a six months study trip to Florence. From 1907 the art dealer Paul Cassirer dedicated the artist numerous solo exhibitions in his Berlin art gallery and published his first monograph in 1913. In 1912 started the life-long collaboration with the publisher Reinhard Piper who published a great number of Beckmann’s graphic works. During the war Beckmann was appointed as a medical orderly on the Belgian front. The profound mark that the war experience left on him was expressed in a series of works that mirrored the disasters of the war, as well as a new dramatic and hopeless vision
of human existence epitomised by the 1918–1919 harsh composition The Night (Düsseldorf, Kunstsammmlung Nordrhein-Westfalen). The twenties were a successful period for Beckmann. Besides the lavish production of graphic works aimed at illustrating books, poem collections and magazines, his exhibitions in Germany and abroad (Stockholm, Paris, Zurich, New York etc..) radically increased, securing him a relatively sound financial situation. Around the same time, the artist also composed two theatre plays: Ebbi (1922, but published in Vienna in 1924) and Das Hotel (1922, published in 1984) and began to teach at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt (1925–1933). After Hitler had seized the power in 1933, Beckmann, started to suffer the obstruction of the new regime. During these years Beckmann produced his first sculptures, including Man in Darkness (1934). In 1937 a number of his works were displayed at the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organised by the Nazis and in 1939 he and his wife he moved to Amsterdam where they remained until the end of the second world war. In 1942 the Museum of Modern Art acquired the triptych The Farewell that he had completed in Berlin in 1933 and
in 1945 the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam secured the Double Portrait with Max and Quappi Beckmann. In 1947 he was appointed professor at the Washington University of Saint Louis where he moved in September of that same year. The last two years in America were characterised by official success and a series of museum exhibitions. Max Beckmann died during a promenade in New York on 27 December 1950.
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