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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 Paintings of Ottilie Roederstein

Born in 1859 to German parents in Zurich, Ottilie Wilhelmine Roederstein was a painter who gained attention mostly in her homeland of Switzerland, but also in France and Germany. Her interest in painting began with the visit to her family home by Swiss painter Eduard Pfyffer who had been commissioned to do the family’s portraits. Beginning in 1876, Roederstein was allowed by her father, against her mother’s wishes and the prevailing social customs, to study painting under the tutelage of Eduard Pfyffer, so she would remain close to home

Three years later, Roederstein moved to the Berlin residence of her married sister Johanna and found a position in a special women’s class at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School under the tutelage of portrait painter Carl Gussow. Her first exhibition of paintings at a Zurich gallery in 1882 was well received. That same year, Roederstein followed her colleagues to Paris where she joined the women’s studio of portrait painters Charles Auguste Émile Durand and Jean-Jacques Henner. In addition to these classes, Roederstein also worked with academic painter Luc-Olivier Merson and painted nudes in special private evening classes.

In order to sustain herself as an artist, Ottilie Roederstein had chosen the genres of portraiture and still life, for which she used a dark-toned color palette. She soon departed from that traditional canon and began to paint religious imagery and nudes. By the very end of the 1890s, Roederstein had embraced the tempera medium which was in vogue among both traditional and avant-garde artists. She experimented with Symbolism and Impressionism in the latter part of her career before returning to her signature style in the 1920s.

Initially dependent on financial support from her family, Roederstein was able by 1887 to support herself with sales and commissions for her work. She returned to Zurich but continued to maintain her Paris studio on the Seine where she would work and exhibit several months of the year. Roederstein moved to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1891 to be with her partner, Elizabeth Winterhalter, a physician and one of the first female surgeons in Germany.

In 1891, Elisabeth Winterhalter had just taken over a practice in Frankfurt am Main’s newly founded hospital, the Vaterländischer Frauenverein. She also set up the first gynecological polyclinic through a branch of the Red Cross organization. Although unable to obtain a German medical license despite her internships and Doctorate, she established a reputation as an obstetrician and gynecologist. In 1895, Winterhalter became the first female surgeon in Germany to perform a surgical procedure involving an incision through the abdominal wall. She also conducted research that led to the discovery of the ganglion cell of the ovary and published a major paper on the subject in 1896.

Soon after her 1891 move to Berlin, Ottilie Roederstein quickly gained a wide circle of clients and, in 1892, began giving women artists painting lessons at her studio in the Städel Art School. She exhibited her paintings in Paris’s Salon and won a Silver Medal at the city’s 1889 Exposition Universelle. Her work was also shown at the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, Illinois. In 1902, Ottilie Roederstein’s application for Swiss citizenship was granted; however, Frankfurt remained at the center of her life. Five years later, she and Elisabeth settled in Hofheim am Taurus, a western Frankfurt suburb surrounded by forest.

Roederstein was a member of the Frankfurt-Cronberg Artists’ Association, a group which was attempting to establish the Impressionist technique of open air painting in Germany. She was also the only female artist to exhibit at Cologne’s 1912 International Art Exhibition. In 1913, Roederstein became a member of Frankfurt’s Women’s Art Association which campaigned for women artists’ rights to equal training and admission to art academies. During the first World War as exhibition opportunities shrank, she gave up her Paris studio and withdrew into the privacy of her Hofheim estate. Beginning in 1920, Roederstein bequeathed her own collection of important French and Swiss paintings to Kunsthaus Zürich, one of the most important art collections in Switzerland.

In 1929 on the occasion of Ottilie Roederstein’s seventieth birthday, a large anniversary exhibition of her work was held at Frankfurt’s Art Museum and the city declared both Roederstein and Winte halter as honorary citizens. The rise of the National Socialist Party to power in Germany and the persecution of her Jewish friends and colleagues deeply affected Roederstein. She herself, as an artist, became subject to the state and had to contend with the government’s increasing control over the arts. After the war, Roederstein continued her painting and did a number of portraits of women widowed by the war.

Ottilie Roederstein continued to exhibit regularly until 1931. She produced a large body of work, of which more than eighty were self-portraits. She usually staged herself in a self-confident pose with a stern gaze, a posture that signified her emancipation. On the 26th of November in 1937, Ottilie W. Roederstein died of a heart condition in Hofheim am Taunus. The first posthumous exhibitions of Roederstein’s work were presented in 1938 in Frankfurt, Zurich and Bern in recognition of her artistic legacy and tireless work as a mediator between Switzerland and Germany. After a long period of obscurity, a retrospective of seventy works by Roederstein was held at Kunsthaus Zürich in December of 2020.

After her partner’s death, Elisabeth Winterhalter created a joint legacy, the Roederstein-Winterhalter-Stiftung. She died in February of 1952 in Hofheim am Taunus. Winterhalter was buried alongside Roederstein in an honorary grave cared for by the community. For her efforts in opening the medical profession to women, a street in the Niederursel district of Frankfurt is named after her.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Ottilie Roederstein in Her Atelier, Date Unknown

Second Insert Image: Ottilie Foederstein, “Self Portrait with Keys”, 1936, 105.3 x 74.6 cm, Städel Museum

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, ” Ottilie roederstein and Elisabeth Winterhalter, Date Unknown

Fourth Insert Image: Ottilie W. Roederstein, “Self Portrait with Hat”, 1904, Oil on Canvas, 55.3 x 46.1 cm, Stäadel Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Photogapher Unknown, Ottilie Roederstein and Elisabeth Winterhalter, Date Unknown, Studio Portrait Print