figurative paintings – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

The Artwork of Max Beckmann

Born in February of 1884 at Leipzig in the Province of Saxony, Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer who is often classified as an Expressionist artist, a term and movement he rejected during his lifetime. He pursued a very personal artistic path that examined the themes of redemption, terror, eternity and fate.

The youngest child born to Carl and Antonie Beckmann, Max Beckmann exhibited artistic talent at an early age. At the age of sixteen, he enrolled at the Weimar Grand Ducal Art Academy where he completed his studies in three years. Beckmann moved to Paris in 1903 and was deeply impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne. Returning to Germany in 1904, he settled in Berlin and, in 1910, began exhibiting work with the Berlin Secessionist artists. Beckmann also had a show at Galerie Paul Cassirer, which represented the Secessionists and French artists, notably Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.

At a time when abstractionist work was developing in Germany, Beckmann was exploring figuration and narrative works with fragments of myths, bible stories, and obscure allegories. He was recognized for his history paintings and portraits of muted palettes and impressionistic brushwork. At the outbreak of World War I, Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly in Belgium; however, the traumatic experiences he suffered in the field led to a nervous breakdown in July of 1915. He was eventually discharged from military service in 1917.

Max Beckmann relocated to Frankfurt for his recovery, but his experiences in the war changed the scope of his work. The romantic compositions of his early work were replaced by more angular forms; his use of paint became more subdued and his palette darkened. Beckmann’s post-war subjects, often depicted more violently, centered around issues of political intolerance, social injustice and poverty. His cynical, crowded, and turbulently colored canvases were populated by characters caught in the chaos of post-World War I urban life. During this immediate post-war period, Beckmann also focused on etching and lithography. He created several black and white print portfolios, among which was the 1918-1919 “Hell” which featured scenes of a devastated Berlin.

Beckmann began teaching a master class in 1925 at Frankfurt’s Städel School and its School for Applied Arts. Having achieved widespread critical and commercial success, he was widely exhibited in Europe and America and his work was held in important museums and many private collections. Beckmann was among the leading artists who practiced the new realist style known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. His work was among those featured in art historian Gustav Hartlaub’s public survey on New Objectivity held at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1924.

As the National Socialist Party in Germany increased its dominance in the early 1930s, modern art became increasingly under attack. Beginning in 1933, exhibitions of modern art toured several German cities solely for the purpose of defaming the work of modern artists, which included Max Beckmann and his contemporaries. The director of Berlin’s National Gallery, Ludwig Justi, attempted to protect its modern art collection by establishing special exhibition rooms in its Museum of Contemporary Art. However, after Adolf Hitler assumed power, Beckmann’s paintings were among those collected and exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition that toured Germany until 1939.

Although he attempted to keep a low profile, Beckmann lost his teaching position in April of 1933. On the day the Degenerate Art Exhibition opened in March of 1937, he and his second wife Quappi relocated to Amsterdam, never to return to Germany. Beckmann joined a large exiled community and remained in contact with his supporters. During this period, he held a teaching position and created over two hundred and fifty paintings, the majority of which were his self-portraits. In 1938, Beckmann traveled to London and gave a speech at the New Burlington Galleries as part of the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art.

In September of 1947, Max Beckmann relocated to the United States and was given a teaching position at Saint Louis’s Washington University Art School where he taught alongside German-American printmaker Werner Drewes. In 1948, Beckmann had his first retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in Saint Louis. Art collector Morton D. May became his patron and student; he later donated a large collection of Beckmann’s work to the City Art Museum.

In the autumn of 1949, Beckmann and his wife Quappi relocated to a 69th Street apartment in Manhattan, New York where he accepted a teaching professorship at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. In 1950, Beckmann had a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and also painted his “Falling Man”, an oil on canvas work similar to the falling men illustrations he created for a 1943-1944 edition of Goethe’s “Faust II”. On the twenty-seventh of December in 1950, Max Beckmann was struck down by a heart attack not far from his building while on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view one of his paintings.

After his death, Max Beckmann’s work was rarely seen in the United States, except for retrospectives held in 1964 and 1965 by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. However since the late twentieth century, retrospectives have been held in major cities throughout Europe and the United States. Many of his late paintings are displayed in American museums, with the Saint Louis Art Museum holding the largest public collection in the world. A new record for a German Expressionist work occurred with the 2017 sale of Max Beckmann’s 1938 “Hölle der Vögel (Birds’ Hell)” at Christie’s London for 45.8 million dollars (42.09 million Euros).

Notes: The Harvard Art Museums has a collection of eighty-five works by Max Beckmann, the majority of which consists of prints and drawings. Images of this collection can be found at: https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/person/27201

A biography of Max Beckmann and short articles on six of his more important paintings can be found at the non-profit Art Story site located at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/beckmann-max/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Max Beckmann in Armchair”, circa 1920-1930, Black and White Print, 8.5 x 5.9 cm, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Frontal Self Portrait with House Gable in Background”, 1918, Drypoint Print, 49.8 x 37.5 cm, Harvard Museums/Fogg Museum

Third Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Café Music”, 1918, Drypoint Print, Harvard Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Fourth Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Self Portrait (Still Life with Globe as the Cover of Portfolio)”, 1946, “Day and Dream” Portfolio Series, Lithograph, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Mas Beckmann, “Der Vorhang hebt sich (The Curtain Rises)”, 1923, Drypoint Print, 29.7 x 21.7 cm, Harvard Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

The Artwork of Paul John Wonner

Born in Tucson, Arizona in April of 1920, Paul John Wonner was an American painter who rose to prominence in the 1950s through his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He was best known for his abstract expressionist styled still-life paintings.

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Paul Wonner earned a Bachelor’s degree in 1941 at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, now the California College of the Arts. During his military service stationed in San Antonio, Texas, he continued his studies and set up a neighborhood studio. In 1946, Wonner was discharged and quickly relocated to New York City to continue his art career. He worked as a commercial designer and attended classes at the Art Student League as well as symposiums at Robert Motherwell’s studio.

In 1950, Wonner returned to his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and his Master of Arts in 1953. Wonner also earned his Master Degree of Library and Information Science in 1955, a requirement for most professional librarian positions in the United States. After graduation, Paul Wonner worked in the late 1950s as a librarian for University of California, Davis, and as a lecturer during the 1960s at the Otis Art Institute and UC Santa Barbara.

At UC Berkeley in 1950, Paul Wonner met fellow painting student William Theophilus Brown who became his lifelong partner. During their studies at the University of California, Wonner and Brown shared a studio space in Berkeley at the same building as painters Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these artists incorporated the figurative style of David Park’s paintings into their own works. This group became a part of what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. In 1957, Wonner joined eleven other artists for the Oakland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting Exhibition.

In the early 1960s, Wonner and Theophilus Brown moved to Malibu where they became part of the Southern California art scene. In 1968, Wonner became a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and began to tutor as an artist in different areas of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1976, he and Brown settled in San Francisco, where as an abstract realist, Wonner continued painting his still lifes and later figurative works. A prolific painter, Paul John Wonner died in April of 2008 in San Francisco; he was survived by his partner Theophilus Brown who died in February of 2012.

Interested in art as an adolescent, Wonner’s initial art training began when his parents hired a local California artist to assist him with his drawing amid his secondary school years. Wonner started his painting career during a time when abstract expressionism was at its height. In Berkeley during his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Wonner’s work was similar to the figurative style of many of his fellow artists. However, his work still retained the vigorous brushwork and strong coloring of the abstract expressionists.

Beginning in 1956, Paul Wonner painted a series of works on paper and canvas that depicted multiple male bathers and boys with bouquets. By the end of the 1960s, he had abandoned his loose, figurative style and concentrated on a hyper-realistic form of still-life images. Although Wonner used the the Dutch Baroque still-life tradition as a historical source, he typically incorporated objects from contemporary life in his works.

In the late 1970s, Wonner’s style turned crisp with an emphasis on sharp shadows and bright lighting effects. As he matured in his painting skills, Wonner’s later works portrayed his subjects distinctly separated through the use of surrealistically rendered vacant spaces. In his most recent figurative work, Wonner’s human figures are situated in arrangements and settings that are vaguely allegorical in nature.

Paul Wonner’s paintings and other artworks are housed in both private and public collections all over the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York city’s Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, California, which has an extensive collection of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown’s work.

Notes: The online Artnet site has an extensive collection of works by Paul Wonner that are available for sale. Images of these works can be found at: https://www.artnet.com/artists/paul-john-wonner/

Scott Shields, the Associate Director and Chief Curator of the Crocker Art Museum, discusses the work of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at the Heather James Fine Art site. In addition to the video discussion, the site includes many images of Wonner and Brown’s work. The Heather James site is located at: https://www.heatherjames.com/multimedia/wonner-and-brown-scott-shields-interview/

Top Insert Image: Frank J. Thomas, “Paul Wonner”, circa 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Paul Wonner, “Model and Mirror”, 1964-65, Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Rose Mandel, “Paul Wonner”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Paul Wonner, Untitled, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Lincoln Yamaguchi, “Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at Berkeley”, 1955, Gelatin Silver Print