Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann was a German painter and graphic artist whose work became a touchstone of 20th‑century figurative expressionism. Trained at the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, he began in an Impressionist mode, but his traumatic service as an assistant in the medical corps during World War I radicalized his painting: he adopted pronounced contours, vivid color, and highly dramatic compositions, often mounting social critique of postwar Germany.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he produced portraits, landscapes, still lifes and, above all, history paintings, creating a personal modernism that engages older traditions—from Rembrandt and Rubens to Bosch and Bruegel—and the format of the religious triptych, which he reinvented as an allegory of the contemporary human condition. In the 1930s his works began to express his dismay at the rise of Nazism, culminating in triptychs of considerable symbolic intensity.

Persecuted by the Nazis and labeled “degenerate,” he emigrated to Amsterdam in 1937 and, after World War II, moved to the United States, where he also taught. Beckmann’s achievement lies in the fusion of figurative tradition and critical modernity: his images examine universal themes—terror, redemption, and fate—and continue to occupy a prominent place in both the market and the art history of the 20th century.