ArtistGermanb.1884–d.1950
Max Beckmann
1 active items
Max Beckmann was painting war long before the first shots were fired. Born in Leipzig in 1884, he had already developed a restless, physically charged figurative style by the time he served as a medical orderly on the Western Front during World War I. What he witnessed there - bodies broken, dignity stripped away - transformed his art permanently. The gentler influences of German Impressionism gave way to something harsher and more confrontational.
Through the Weimar years, Beckmann became a central figure in the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, though he resisted most labels applied to him, including Expressionist. His paintings from the 1920s - crowded interiors, circus performers, masked figures, self-portraits - carried a density of meaning that defied easy classification. He taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and was considered, by the late 1920s, one of Germany's most significant living painters.
In 1933 the Nazi government dismissed him from his teaching post, and in 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums. Several appeared in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. The evening that Hitler's speech about degenerate art was broadcast on radio, Beckmann left Germany. He would not return. He and his second wife Quappi spent the next decade in Amsterdam, where he continued painting despite isolation, financial hardship, and the German occupation.
The nine triptychs Beckmann completed between 1932 and 1950 are among the most ambitious works in 20th-century painting. The first, Departure (now at MoMA), was begun in Frankfurt as the Nazis rose to power. It sets a scene of brutal captivity flanking a central image of mysterious departure - freedom, or perhaps death - that refuses to resolve into a single meaning. His prolific printmaking - 373 prints in total, predominantly etchings and drypoints - runs parallel to the paintings and carries the same compressed intensity.
In 1947 Beckmann finally obtained a US visa and moved to New York, teaching at Washington University in St. Louis and later at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He died in New York on December 27, 1950, having just completed his final self-portrait. Those self-portraits, numbering around 85, form one of the most sustained and searching bodies of self-examination in Western art.
On Auctionist, Beckmann's 21 items divide between prints and engravings (15 lots) and paintings (7 lots), appearing primarily at Karl & Faber and Grisebach - two German houses that have long been central to the Beckmann market. The top recorded sales in our database include Selbstbildnis at 7,620 EUR and Der große Mann at 6,985 EUR. These figures reflect the print and works-on-paper segment of a market that, at its highest levels, reached a record of over $46 million (Hölle der Vögel, Christie's London, 2017).