Max Beckmann

Biography

The earliest surviving self-portrait by Beckmann is dated to about 1898, and he went on painting himself for the rest of his life. The best known of them, “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo”, was made in 1927, at the height of his success. The following year the National Gallery in Berlin bought the canvas.

He was born in Leipzig, into a family from the area around Braunschweig. The sources disagree on his date of birth: 12 or 27 February 1884. His father, who had owned a mill and later traded in grain, died when the boy was about eleven and the family was living in Braunschweig. Beckmann was a poor pupil but took an early interest in the history of art. After a failed attempt to enter the Dresden academy, he passed the entrance examination for the art school in Weimar, and from 1901 he studied under the Norwegian portrait painter Carl Frithjof Smith, whom he later called his only teacher. From him he took the habit of a heavy preliminary drawing and kept it for good. In 1903 he left the school without a diploma and went to Paris, where Cézanne impressed him, then travelled in the Netherlands.

Recognition came early too. In 1906 he won the Villa Romana Prize for the large painting “Young Men by the Sea”, went to Florence as a fellow of the villa, and in 1907 joined the Berlin Secession. He turned down an invitation to join Die Brücke in Dresden. By 1913 the first monograph on him had appeared, and in 1914 he was one of the founders of the Free Secession. Beckmann rejected Expressionism, both in his early twenties and later; in his view, the laws of art are eternal, like the moral law.

In the First World War he volunteered as a medical orderly and served on the Eastern Front and in Flanders; in 1915 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was released from service. By his own account he never fired a shot. His drawings from the war years and the etchings that followed became the basis of a new, hard, angular style. He settled in Frankfurt, and a comparison of two “Resurrections”, of 1909 and of 1916–1918, shows the change: in the first the figures strain toward the light, in the second people suffer without aim. The painting “The Night” (1918–1919) shows the murder of a family. From the end of the war the circus, variety theatre, masks and the fairground appear in his work.

In the Weimar Republic he was one of the most recognised artists in the country. From 1925 he ran a master class at the Städel art school in Frankfurt; among his pupils were Theo Garve, Léo Maillet and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky. That same year he married Mathilde von Kaulbach, known as Quappi, whom he painted and drew constantly. In 1927 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the gold medal of the city of Düsseldorf; in 1928 the first major retrospective was held in Mannheim, in 1930 six of his works were shown at the Venice Biennale, and in 1931 his first solo exhibition opened in Paris. Alongside this he read theosophical and Gnostic texts and wrote poems and plays, which were not staged in his lifetime. In 1932 the National Gallery in Berlin gave him a room of his own.

In April 1933 he was dismissed from the Städel. The 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, an exhibition mounted by the Nazi authorities to denounce modern art, showed 21 of his works, and more than 650 (by other accounts, over 500) were confiscated from German museums. The day after Adolf Hitler’s radio speech at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition, Beckmann left the country; on 19 July 1937 he arrived in Amsterdam with his wife, the journey disguised as a holiday. He lived there for ten years, trying without success to obtain an American visa. In May 1940, after the German occupation of the Netherlands, he and Quappi burned his diaries from 1925 onward. In Amsterdam he painted “Self-Portrait with Horn” (1938) and several triptychs, and illustrated the Apocalypse and the second part of Goethe’s “Faust”. In 1944 an attempt was made to conscript him into the army, although he was sixty and had suffered a heart attack.

The couple received visas for the United States in the summer of 1947. Beckmann taught a master class at the School of Fine Arts of Washington University in St. Louis; in 1948 his first American retrospective was held at the city’s art museum, and in 1949 he became a professor at the art school of the Brooklyn Museum. The collector Morton May, who began collecting his work in St. Louis, later bequeathed it to the city’s museum, which now holds the largest public collection of his paintings. I think the late American years are often underrated: he managed to paint “The Argonauts”, his ninth triptych.

Beckmann died on 27 December 1950 on a street in New York, not far from his home, near Central Park. The tenth triptych, “Ballet Rehearsal”, was left unfinished.