Beckmann, Max

Beckmann, Max (mäks bĕk`män), 1884–1950, German painter. A member of the Berlin secession from 1908 to 1911, he was impressionistic in his early style. A subsequent expressionistic phase was altered c.1917 by the savage new objectivity of George Grosz. Beckmann developed a richer, more personal, more dramatic, and more symbolic art in the 1920s. The power of his allegorical expressionism increased through the war years, which, after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937, he spent in Amsterdam. Beckmann lived his last three years in New York City, where he taught at the Brooklyn Museum School. His well-known triptych, Departure (1932–35; Mus. of Modern Art, N.Y.C.) is one of 18 powerfully monumental triptychs that culminated in The Argonauts (1950).

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Beckmann, Max

(born Feb. 12, 1884, Leipzig, Ger.—died Dec. 27, 1950, New York, N.Y., U.S.) German Expressionist painter and graphic artist. After training at the conservative Weimar Academy, in 1903 he moved to Berlin and joined the Berlin Sezession. His experience as a medical orderly in World War I changed his outlook, and his work became full of horrifying imagery, with deliberately repulsive colours and erratic forms. He considered his work to be a combination of brutal realism and social commentary. In 1933 the Nazis declared his art “degenerate” and forced him to resign his professorship at the Städel School of Art in Frankfurt. In 1937 he fled to Amsterdam, and in 1947 he moved to the U.S., where he taught in St. Louis, Mo., and New York City.