Birth Year : 1884
Death Year : 1950
Country : Germany
Max Beckmann was an expressionist painter and graphic artist, born in
Leipzig, East Germany. He studied at the Weimar School of Art for three
years, before traveling to Florence and to Paris. He was especially impressed
by Piero della Francesca, the French primitives, Cezanne,
and van Gogh. From 1906 to 1914, Beckmann
was associated with the "Berlin Secession" movement, while painting in
a distinctively impressionistic manner. His experiences as a medical corpsman
in 1914-15 were such a shock to his sensibilities that when, after a severe
illness, he began to paint again, in 1917, his work became infused with
the icy bitterness of a reaction to the horrors of war and to the depression
of the postwar years in Germany.
His compositions, in 1920,
were strongly defined within spaces confined by harsh lines of contour.
His color was limited, symbolic in tonality, and quite cold. His principal
subject, the human being, "the monster of vitality," was presented in nightmarish
scenes of brutally raw living. As the memories of war and and postwar began
to fade, this nightmarish quality changed to one of dreamlike disillusion
in his landscapes, his still lives, and in his portraits of bold or occasionally
tender women. His enigmatic portraits of men, or of himself are equally
inscrutable.
In 1933 he left Frankfurt for political reasons
and went to Berlin where he stayed until 1936. He then went to Amsterdam
and finally, in 1940, to New York where he died ten years later. The paintings
from this final phase are freer and broader in style, simpler in expression,
and more varied in their use of color. His subjects are mythical or allegorical
and his motifs are symbolic. He expresses, with a force that is almost
physical in impact, the problems of man's existence in a difficult world.
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