Beckmann, Max

Beckmann, Max (1884–1950). German painter and graphic artist, one of the most powerful and individual of Expressionist artists. He was born in Leipzig, the son of a flour merchant, and studied at the Weimar Academy, 1900–3. After spending five months in Paris, he settled in Berlin in 1904. At the beginning of his career Beckmann painted figure subjects in a conservative, more or less Impressionist style, with which he built up a successful career, but his experiences as a medical orderly in the First World War completely changed his outlook and style. The horrors he witnessed affected him so badly that he was discharged in 1915 after a nervous breakdown. He settled in Frankfurt, where he initially worked mainly on drawings and dry-points; it was only after the war that painting became predominant again. Although he rarely depicted scenes from the war itself, his works became full of horrifying imagery, and his forms were expressively distorted in a manner that reflected the influence of German Gothic sculpture. The brutal intensity and element of social criticism in his work led him for a time to be classified with the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit, with whom he exhibited at the Kunsthalle, Mannheim, in 1925, but Beckmann differed from such artists as Dix and Grosz in his concern for allegory and symbolism and in his highly personal blend of the real and the visionary. His paintings were intended as depictions of lust, sadism, cruelty, etc., rather than illustrations of specific instances of those qualities at work; he ceased to regard painting as a purely aesthetic matter, and thought of it as a moral necessity.

Beckmann was appointed a professor at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, in 1929, and from this time began to spend each winter in Paris. In 1933 he was dismissed from his post by the Nazis, and in that year he began Departure (MOMA, New York), the first of a series of nine great triptychs that occupied him for much of the rest of his life and in which he expressed his horror at man's cruelty. He moved to the Netherlands in 1937 (leaving Germany the day after he witnessed Hitler opening the House of German Art in Munich—see NATIONAL SOCIALIST ART). Originally he had intended moving to Paris, but he lived in Amsterdam until 1947. In 1938 he visited London for the exhibition of ‘Twentieth-Century German Art’ put on at the New Burlington Galleries as a reply to the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition. At the London exhibition Beckmann delivered a lecture My Theory of Painting (Meine Theorie der Malerie), which was published in 1941. In 1947 he emigrated to the USA, where he spent the remaining three years of his life; he taught at various art schools, mainly in St Louis and New York. Beckmann's philosophical outlook, as expressed in My Theory of Painting, is somewhat incoherent, but his work forms one of the most potent commentaries on the disorientation of the modern world. Apart from his allegorical figure compositions, he is best known for his portraits, particularly his numerous self-portraits, in which he charted his spiritual experiences.