Biographical Information:
Born of wealthy parents in Leipzig, he was schooled in the German and Dutch Early Renaissance painters at the strongly conventional Weimar Academy of Art. Visits to Paris in 1903 and Italy in 1904 introduced him to the stimulus of Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca, and other baroque masters; but Beckmann was not at that time deeply attracted to postimpressionist art - he later found some interest in Cezanne. He settled in Berlin in 1903, then a center of German Impressionism and Art Nouveau. In 1906 he was admitted to the Berlin Secession, a prestigious group that in 1892 had organized in a spirit of liberal protest but that had gradually come to represent the old guard. Influenced by Delacroix and by the German academic tradition, he painted large religious and classical murals and versions of contemporary disasters such as the sinking of the "Titanic" (1912).
Beckmann was not especially progressive until shortly before World War I, although he had resigned from the Secession in 1911. World War I brought him into the German army as a medical corpsman where he suffered a nervous breakdown. The shattering horror of the spectacle of the dying and the dead provided him involuntarily with the core of his later nightmarish imagery and turned him towards a search for internal reality.
His next style emerged out of Late Gothic, Cubism, and German Expressionism. Beckmann responded to the violence and cruelty of World War I by painting dramas of torture and brutality - symptomatic of the lawlessness of the time and prophetic of the state-sponsored genocide of the 1930s. Painted in pale, emotionally repulsive colors, the figures could be twisted and distorted within a compressed space, as in late medieval representations of the tortures of the damned, and the horror heightened by explicit and accurate details.
In 1916 he was made professor of painting at the Frankfurt Academy. His paintings and prints following 1918 gradually became free from the Berlin impressionist brushwork and steadily acquired the bold, spatially compressed, and harshly delineated forms that were thereafter to distinguish his style. Many of Beckman's themes after about 1920 project sadistic, hazardous situations in which bodily discomfort or outright pains were explicitly depicted and their sources are allegorically or symbolically suggested.
Beckmann's paintings and prints of the middle 1920s have been identified by some critics with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style, a hard, socially conscious realism then practiced by George Grosz, Otto Dix, and other artists who painted the spectacle of economic disaster and human depravity that was widespread in postwar Germany.
His style, with its closely grouped, tensely paced shapes and its strange conjunction of strong linear definition and painterly surfaces, became one of the most distinctive in modern German painting. In the late 1920's his reputation was internationally established, and he had won an important prize at the 1929 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
The Nazi government after 1933 proscribed Beckmann's art, like that of most avant-garde artists in Germany, as "degenerate"; and he had to quit his professorship in Frankfurt. 590 of his works were confiscated from museums throughout Germany. At first he sought refuge in Berlin, where he finished his triptych "The Departure" (1932-34). On the opening day of the 1937 "Degenerate Art" show in Munich, which included several of his paintings, the artist and his wife fled to Amsterdam . In 1947, after years of hiding from the Nazis, Beckmann accepted a teaching position at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and became a highly influential teacher. In 1949 he settled in New York and taught at the Brooklyn Museum School. He had just completed the last of his nine allegorical triptychs, "The Argonauts", when in 1950 he died.
Although never closely linked to any of the definitive expressionist groups in Germany, he became one of the major expressionists of the 20th century.
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