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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 Artwork of Alfred Kubin

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin was born in Litoměřice of the Czech Republic, formerly Leitmeritz of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in April of 1877. An important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism, he was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator and author known for his dark, spectral and symbolic fantasies, often assembled into a series of thematic drawings.

In 1892, Alfred Kubin began a four-year apprenticeship under landscape photographer and painter Alois Beer. After attempting suicide on his mother’s grave in 1896, he served one year in the Austrian Army before his release due to a mental breakdown. In 1898, Kubin studied at the atelier of German naturalist painter Ludwig Schmitt- Reutte which was followed by a short period of study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

During his studies, Kubin became acquainted with the works of such Symbolist artists as Odilon Redon, Henry de Groux and Félicien Rops as well as the works of painter Edvard Munch and printmaker Max Klinger. His early works, mainly ink and wash drawings of fantastical or macabre subjects, were influenced by the aquatint techniques of Klinger and Francisco de Goya. Between 1902 and 1910, Kubin produced a small amount of oil paintings; however, his oeuvre consists mainly of watercolors, pen and ink drawings, and lithographs.

Beginning in 1906 until his death, Alfred Kubin lived a withdrawn life at Schloss Zwickledt, the manor house of an eleventh-century estate in northern Austria near the German border. He was joined by his wife, translator Hedwig Kubin, the sister of noted German writer Oscar Schmitz, until her death in 1948. By 1911, Kubin had exhibited his work at Berlin’s Galerie Paul Cassirer and at both Vienna and Berlin Secessionist exhibitions. He was also associated with the Blaue Reiter group, a loose confederacy founded by Wassily Kardinsky and Franz Marc for Expressionist artists’ exhibitions and publication activities. Kubin showed his work at the 1913 Blaue Reiter exhibition in Berlin that was sponsored by the German avant-garde art and literary magazine “Der Strum”.

Kubin became well established professionally by the 1920s. Represented by Otto Kallir’s Neue Gallery in Vienna, he worked as a printmaker and book illustrator with such major German dealers as Hans Goltz, J. B. Neumann and Frita Gurlitt. Kubin created illustrations for works by American author Edgar Allan Poe, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and German fantasy author Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, among others. He also supplied illustrations for the German fantasy magazine “Der Orchideengarten”. Founded in 1919 by freelance writers Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, “The Orchid Garden” is considered the first fantasy magazine.

Alfred Kubin worked on a series of illustrations intended for Austrian novelist Gustav Meyrink’s upcoming novel “The Golem”. However due to an extended printing delay, Kubin used the completed illustrations for his only literary work, the 1908 “Die Andere Seite (The Other Side)”, a fantasy novel set in an oppressive society. These illustrations introduced a more realistic style, executed with intense pen strokes and sometimes heightened with watercolor, that would characterize his work for the remainder of his career.

Due to his isolation at Schloss Zwickledt, Kubin was able to live through the German Reich’s war years relatively undisturbed. He was able to exhibit some of his work; however, there was little demand for his drawings during the war years. In 1941, Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in New York City held Kubin’s first American solo exhibition and would regularly exhibit his work after that show. Once the war had ended, Austria honored him with a retrospective in Vienna and later awarded him the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts in 1950.

Hailed as a national treasure by Austria, Alfred Kubin was given a section for his work, known as the Kubin Kabinett, at the prestigious Neue Galerie in the city of Linz. He was awarded the Austrian Medal for Science and Art in 1957. A member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Alfred Kubin died at his Zwickledt home in August of 1959 at the age of eighty-two.

Notes: The Kallir Research Institute, a nonprofit foundation, was established to expand upon the scholarship of art dealer and historian Otto Kallir. Primarily focused on Austrian and German expressionists, the Institute also specializes on artists who were sponsored by Otto Kallir. On its site, there is a short biography of Alfred Kubin and links to his work: https://kallirresearch.org/bio-alfred-kubin/

Top Insert Image: Nicola Perscheid, “Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin”, 1898, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Alfred Kubin, “Prähistorische Büffel (Prehistoric Buffalo)”, circa 1907, Gouache and Tempera on Kataster Paper, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Alfred Kubin, “Prähistorische Vögel (Prehistoric Bird)”, circa 1906-07, Tempera on Kataster Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Eric Schaal, “Portrait of Alfred Kubin”, 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 9.4 x 7.4 cm, Private Collection