PECHSTEIN, Max (Eckersbach, 1881 – Berlin, 1955)
Hermann Max Pechstein was born on 31 December 1881 in Eckersbach, near Zwickau in Easter Germany. From 1896 to 1900 he studied decorative painting in Zwickau, from 1900 to 1902 he was enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, and from 1903 to 1906 he attended the master classes in painting run by Otto Gussmann at the Dresden Kunstakademie. In 1906 he joined the Dresden artists’ group Brücke, whose founder members were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. In the same year, the award of the Saxon State Prize for painting enabled him to travel to Italy, where he visited Rome, Florence, Ravenna and Castel Gandolfo (autumn 1907). Returning to Germany via Paris, he established contact with the Fauve artists of the circle around Matisse and Van Dongen, and brought home to his companions news of the latest developments in French avant-garde painting. In autumn 1908 he moved to Berlin, the first member of Brücke to do so; he was followed there in the course of 1911 by Kirchner, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff. In 1909 he paid his first visit to Nidden, a remote “artists’ paradise” in the Eastern Baltic; he was to return there in 1911 and again in 1912. In 1910 he spent the summer together with Kirchner and Heckel at the Moritzburg lakes, near Dresden. In the same year, in protest to the conservative policies of the Berlin Secession which was dominated by the German Impressionist painter Max Liebermann and the art dealer Paul Cassirer, he founded a breakaway group of artist which he called the “New Secession”.
In 1914, following the footsteps of Gauguin and Nolde, he visited the Palau Islands in the Western Pacific, then a German protectorate; Nolde was in New Guinea at about the same time. From 1915 to 1917 he was engaged in military service in Germany, and at the end of the Great War he became a founder member of the left-wing Novembergruppe and Arbeistrat für Kunst in Berlin. In 1921 he spent his first summer on the Lebasse in Pomerania; this was to become his summer retreat for many years, including during the Nazi period. Elected a member of the Preußische Akademie der Künste in 1922, during the 1920s and early 30s he was one of the most successful of all German artists, his works being acquired by many major museums, among then the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The same period saw prolonged visits to Switzerland, Italy and the South of France. Condemned as “degenerate” (as were virtually all Expressionist painters) by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, in 1937 over 300 of his works were confiscated from German public museums, some of them being held up to ridicule in the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition which began its tour of German and Austrian cities in Munich that summer. Having been dismissed from the Preußische Akademie der Künste by the Nazis, after the war he was immediately appointed to a professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, a post which he retained until his death in Berlin on 29 June 1955.
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