Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann was a German artist, renowned for the paintings and prints he made in a broadly expressionistic style in the first half of the 20th century. Many of these were self-portraits. Beckmann admitted to being obsessed by art and said that he ‘would meander through all the sewers of the world, through degradations and humiliations, in order to paint’.

Beckmann was born in the city of Leipzig in 1884, going on to study at the Great Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar. His early work showed influences ranging from Paul Cezanne to the Impressionists. However, his career as an avant-garde artist truly began with the advent of the World War I. Beckmann joined the medical corps in 1914, but was forced to quit after suffering a nervous breakdown — or what he called ‘injuries to the soul’ — the following year.

The mood and the palette of his paintings grew darker thereafter, his forms more angular, and his scenes invested with a greater sense of violence. A good example is The Night (1918–19), a nightmarish picture which today is found in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

In the 1920s, Beckmann produced a number of sardonic visions of life in the Weimar Republic and was strongly associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement which developed in Germany that decade.

In around 1930, he started painting triptychs, a format which Beckmann would successfully embrace for the rest of his career. These tended to be allegorical and large-scale. A famous example is Departure (1932–35), which was partly inspired by trepidation surrounding Hitler’s rise to power and which today forms part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

The Nazis dismissed Beckmann from a teaching post he held at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and also removed his paintings from view at the National Gallery in Berlin. In 1937, several of his works were included in Entartete Kunst in Munich, an exhibition of art deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. A day after its opening, Beckmann relocated to Amsterdam, where he would spend all of World War II. He moved to the United States in 1947 and died there three years later.

In 2017, his painting Hölle der Vögel (1937–38) sold at Christie’s for US$20,605,000 — setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a work by Beckmann at auction.