1884-1950 was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is usually classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. He was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony. From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. His traumatic experiences of World War I, in which he served as a medic, coincided with a dramatic transformation of his style from academically correct depictions to a distortion of both figure and space, reflecting his altered vision of himself and humanity.He is known for the self-portraits he painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivalled only by Rembrandt and Picasso. Well-read in philosophy and literature, he also contemplated mysticism and theosophy in search of the "Self". As a true painter-thinker, he strove to find the hidden spiritual dimension in his subjects. (Beckmann's 1948 "Letters to a Woman Painter" provides a statement of his approach to art.) In the Weimar Republic of the Twenties, Beckmann enjoyed great success and official honors. In 1927 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of D??sseldorf; the National Gallery in Berlin acquired his painting The Bark and, in 1928, purchased his Self-Portrait in Tuxedo.In 1925 he was selected to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt. Some of his most famous students included Theo Garve, Leo Maillet and Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky. His fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state. In 1933, the Nazi government bizarrely called Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik"and dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums, and several of these works were put on display in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.For ten years, Beckmann lived in poverty in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam, failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the US. In 1944 the Germans attempted to draft him into the army, despite the fact that the sixty-year-old artist had suffered a heart attack. The works completed in his Amsterdam studio were even more powerful and intense than the ones of his master years in Frankfurt, and included several large triptychs, which stand as a summation of Beckmann's art. After the war, Beckmann moved to the United States, and during the last three years of his life, he taught at the art schools of Washington University in St. Louis (with the German-American painter and printmaker Werner Drewes) and the Brooklyn Museum. He suffered from angina pectoris and died after Christmas 1950, struck down by a heart attack in Manhattan.Many of his late paintings are now displayed in American museums.   Related Paintings of Max Beckmann :. | Das Nizza in Frankfurt am Main | Garden Landscape in Spring with Mountains | Sturmischer day | Water tower in Hermsdorf | Nollendorfplatz |
Related Artists:
Antoine Coypel
1661-1722 French Antoine Coypel Location Antoine studied at the Coll?ge d Harcourt and then trained in his father studio and at the Academie Royale. In 1672 No Coypel was made Director of the Academie de France in Rome, and Antoine, who accompanied his father to Italy, benefited from the education given to the students there. He also joined in their long sessions spent copying Raphael frescoes in the Vatican Loggie and the works of the Carracci and Domenichino in the Palazzo Farnese. He met Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini and Carlo Maratti and was awarded a drawing prize by the Accademia di S Luca. During his return journey Antoine stopped in northern Italy to study the works of Correggio
Costanzo da Ferrara
the period of 1465-1535
Carl Wilhelmson
1866-1928 Swedish painter and lithographer. Wilhelmson trained first as a commercial lithographer in Göteborg. In 1886 he enrolled as a student of decorative painting at Valand College of Art where his teacher was Carl (Olof) Larsson. In 1888, having obtained a travel grant, he went to Leipzig to study lithographic technique. From 1890 to 1896 he lived in Paris, where he worked as a lithographer and commercial artist and studied at the Academie Julian. Wilhelmson's preferred subject-matter was the coastal landscape of Bohuslen and the people of its little fishing villages with their huddles of wooden houses. There is no trace of ethnography in his depictions of local life; they are full of serious realism and display a sensitive insight into the perilous life of the fishermen, with which he had been familiar since childhood. In the Village Shop