23 Facts About Max Beckmann

1.

Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer.

2.

Max Beckmann was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony.

3.

Max Beckmann is known for the self-portraits painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivaled only by those of Rembrandt and Picasso.

4.

Max Beckmann's fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state.

5.

The day after Hitler's radio speech about degenerate art in 1937, Max Beckmann left Germany with his second wife, Quappi, for the Netherlands.

6.

For ten years, Max Beckmann lived in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam, failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the United States.

7.

In 1947, Max Beckmann took a position at the St Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University.

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8.

Max Beckmann came to St Louis at the invitation of Perry T Rathbone, director of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

9.

Max Beckmann helped him learn to appreciate Oceanian and African art.

10.

Max Beckmann had a one-man show at the Venice Biennale of 1950, the year of his death.

11.

Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Max Beckmann rejected non-representational painting; instead, he took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting.

12.

Max Beckmann greatly admired not only Cezanne and Van Gogh, but Blake, Rembrandt, and Rubens, as well as Northern European artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such as Bosch, Bruegel, and Matthias Grunewald.

13.

Max Beckmann reinvented the religious triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into an allegory of contemporary humanity.

14.

From his beginnings in the fin de siecle to the period after World War II, Max Beckmann reflected an era of radical changes in both art and history in his work.

15.

Many of Max Beckmann's paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

16.

Max Beckmann exerted a profound influence on such American painters as Philip Guston and Nathan Oliveira, and, indeed, on Boston Expressionism, the art movement that later expanded nationally and is called American Figurative Expressionism.

17.

Since the late 20th century, Max Beckmann's work has gained an increasing international reputation.

18.

In Spain and Italy, Max Beckmann's work has been accessible to a wider public for the first time.

19.

The Max Beckmann Archiv was established in 1977 and is under the auspices of the Bavarian State Painting Collections.

20.

Max Beckmann's essays, plays and, above all, his diaries are unique historical documents.

21.

In 1921 Beckmann signed an exclusive contract with the print-dealer J B Neumann in Berlin.

22.

In 2017, an anonymous bidder paid the record sum of $45.8 million for Max Beckmann's Holle der Vogel at Christie's in London; this was a new world record for a German Expressionism artwork.

23.

Several important works by Max Beckmann were discovered in the Munich flat of Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012, and are the subject of intense scrutiny by the German police and art historians for their provenance and sale during the Nazi period.