Max Beckmann: A Journey Through Art and Adversity

Max Beckmann, born in Leipzig in 1884, was a pivotal figure in modern art, known for his distinct style and profound thematic content. He began his formal art education at the Weimar Academy from 1900 to 1903 and subsequently worked in Berlin, where his early paintings were notably influenced by Impressionism. Beckmann's initial works also delved into biblical and mythological themes, showcasing his admiration for medieval art.

Beckmann's life took a dramatic turn with the onset of World War I in 1914. He served as a medical orderly, an experience that led to a nervous breakdown and his subsequent discharge. The harrowing experiences of war left an indelible mark on Beckmann, profoundly shaping his later artistic output. After the war, Beckmann settled in Frankfurt in 1915, where he began creating figurative compositions that depicted a harsh vision of the contemporary world, marked by brutality and oppressive apathy. His painting "The Night" (1919) is a stark example of this, portraying a scene of torture that reflects the social realities of the time while also serving as a powerful symbolic composition.

Beckmann's work is often described as transcendental realism, a blend of realistic portrayal with allegorical and symbolic significance. This style is evident in the recurring motifs in his paintings, such as candles and musical instruments. His compositions are characterized by simplified forms and a crowded, almost two-dimensional space, creating a unique and instantly recognizable aesthetic. Beckmann also produced numerous self-portraits, offering introspective glimpses into his evolving identity as an artist.

The rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 marked another turning point in Beckmann's life. Dismissed from his teaching post in Frankfurt, he painted "Robbery of Europe" and the triptych "Departure" that same year. Facing increasing oppression, Beckmann fled to Berlin, then to Paris and Amsterdam, before eventually settling in the United States in 1947. In America, Beckmann's work became lighter and less harsh, reflecting a new phase in his artistic journey. In his final years, Beckmann received numerous academic honors and prizes, including recognition at the prestigious Venice Biennale.

Max Beckmann's legacy is a testament to his resilience and unwavering commitment to his art. His work continues to resonate, offering a powerful commentary on the human condition and the tumultuous times in which he lived.
Max Beckmann: A Journey Through Art and Adversity

Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) - the greatest master of the English baroque portrait

Kneller was born Gottfried Kniller in Lübeck, Germany a son of Zacharias Kniller and his wife Lucia. His father was a painter and the Chief Surveyor of the city of Lübeck. Kneller studied in Amsterdam under Ferdinand Bol, one of Rembrandt’s pupils, before going to Italy in 1672.

He was in Rome and Venice until 1674, probably painting portraits of the Venetian nobility, before settling in England in 1676.

Arriving in England in 1674 or 1675, he soon established himself as a portrait painter, especially after he painted Charles II, and he succeeded the leading portraitist of the Restoration period, Sir Peter Lely, as principal painter to the king.

In 1684-5 Kneller was in France, painting Louis XIV for Charles II. Following the accession of William III and Mary II in 1689 he was appointed their principal painter jointly with John Riley.

Kneller popularized the Kit-Cat format for portraits (36 x 28 inches), named after his portraits of the members of the famous Whig dining club.

In 1704 he married Susanna Grave (nee Cawley) but had no children. By his mistress Mrs Voss he had a daughter Catherine.

In 1711 he became Governor of the first London Academy, and was re-elected annually until 1718.
Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) - the greatest master of the English baroque portrait

Sergey Ivanov (1864-1910)

Sergey Vasilyevich Ivanov was born in a town of Ruza on June 16, 1864 and died on August 16, 1910 at aged of 46 in Svistukh, Dmitrovsky District. His father was a tax collector for the Customs Service. He came from the family of nobles of the Voronezh oblast.

At the age of 11 Sergey entered the Konstantinovsky Institute of Land Surveying. The Institute was not to his liking and on the advice of P. P. Sinebatov, a colleague of his fathers in the autumn of 1878 he started studying at the Moscow School of Art, Sculpture and Architecture as an external student.

From 1882 to 1884, Ivanov studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Then, he left the Academy and moved to Moscow.

In 1884, Sergey returned to the Moscow School of Art, Sculpture and Architecture and graduated from it in 1885.

Sergey Ivanov taught in the Moscow Painting, Sculpture and Architecture School (1900–1910) and the Stroganov Higher Arts and Crafts College (from 1899).
Sergey Ivanov (1864-1910)

Vostanik Manoog Adoyan (1904 – 1948): Also known as Arshile Gorky

The artist Arshile Gorky played a central role in the development of Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s. Gorky was born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan in the small village of Khorkom in Turkish Armenia. His father fled to the United States to avoid the draft when Gorky was still a boy.

With the advent of Armenian genocide of 1915, the family moved to the Soviet-controlled Yerevan, where the artist’s mother soon died of starvation, inspiring a lengthy series of sincere and touching portraits in the oeuvre of the late Gorky.

Gorky was not reunited with his father until 1920, when he arrived with his sister in the United States after witnessing the death of his mother at the hands of Turkish militants.

In 1922, he enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, and, upon graduation, became a part-time instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1925, he moved to New York City and adopted the pseudonym Arshile Gorky, claiming to be a relative of the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky.

In New York City, Gorky studied at the Grand Central Art School, quickly rising from the position of student to educator. His works during this time reflected the current Modernist style and the mature styles of Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso.

The artist was drawing daily, using various means, among them pencils, crayons, pens and watercolors. He washed his drawings in the bathtub, hung them up to dry, and then scraped and sanded their surfaces.

By the thirties Gorky was recognized as a leader by Willem de Kooning and David Smith, among others, but it was only in 1939 that he entered his most fruitful period and developed the style known as Abstract Surrealism.

In 1941, Gorky began integrating turpentine into his paints in order to loosen the structure and allow more freedom with form.

Works of Arshile Gorky including:
*Virginia summer 1946
*Landscape in the Manner of Cézanne (1927)
*Landscape, Staten Island (1927–1928)
*The Artist and His Mother, (ca. 1926–1936)
*Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia (1930–1934)

Afflicted by depression, financial worries, cancer and paralysis of his painting arm, he died by suicide in 1948.
Vostanik Manoog Adoyan (1904 – 1948): Also known as Arshile Gorky

Armin Reumann (1889-1952)

Malers Armin Reumann, German post-impressionist painter was born in Sonneberg.

In 1907 Reumann moved to Munich and studied at the Munich Art Academy and from 1910 he participated in exhibitions. He received first orders of Duke George II and Prince Ernst of Saxe-Meiningen.

His landscapes, portraits, still-lifes and interiors are all characterized by the spontaneous and intuitive capturing of a mood, of an atmospheric landscape. The most recent auction is a painting sold in 2020.
Armin Reumann (1889-1952)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or known as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24th 1864 at Albi, to one of the France’s oldest families of the provincial nobility. His parents, Comtesse Adèle Tapié de Céleyran, and Comte Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, were first cousins, His father Alphonse, count of Toulouse-Lautrec, a brilliant horseman with a passion for the hunt and horses, like all his line.

As a child, Henri suffered from frequent pains in his legs, and in his adolescence, he broke both of his thighbones in two accidents. These triggered the early onset of pyknodysostosis, a hereditary form of latent dwarfism which normally does not manifest itself until adulthood, but, in Lautrec’s case, it stunted the growth of his legs and curtailed his physical ability at an early age.

As of 1882, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, very protected by his mother, Countess Adèle, completes his classical studies in Paris at the lycée Condorcet then in Montmartre in the studios of the academic painters Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon.He also meets with Louis Anquetin, Vincent van Gogh and Emile Bernard but also withMaurice Joyant andMichel Manziwho will always defend his work.

With his genius for portraits, he immortalized the stars, from Aristide Bruant to Jane Avril, from Yvette Guilbert to Loïe Füller. A regular visitor to brothels, he studied the simple day-to-day reality of the prostitutes.

He died at his mother's Malrome estate in Gironde, on September 9th 1901. In his brief lifetime he created some 737 canvases, 275watercolors, 368 prints and posters, and 5,084 drawings, not including lost works, an occasional sculpture, ceramic, or stained-glass window. He was one of the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)

Jean-Léon Gérôme was born in Vesoul (Haute-SaOne) on May 11, 1824. He was a major French painter. The son of a provincial goldsmith, Gérôme was accepted into the Paris studio of the painter Paul Delaroche, where he studied until 1843.

The painting "The Cock Fight" exhibited at the 1887 Salon launched his carrier. He won a third-class medal and the painting became the property of the State. Gérôme 's career was extremely productive (over 550 paintings and 75 sculptures) and successful.

From 1855, Gérôme regularly travelled to the East coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1857, he travelled along side Emile Augier and August Bartholdi in Egypt. In 1859 he showed the first Egyptian genre painting at the Salon, showing an innovative view of the Middle-East. Gérôme also exhibited three historical works: "King Candaules", "Ave Caesar" and "Death of Caesar".

Gérôme also travelled to Syria, Jordan (1862), Jerusalem (1868), Spain (1873) and Algeria (1873, 1883). The frequent trips to the Middle East provided the artist with interesting themes, as well as allowing him to amass a collection of Oriental artistic craftwork, which became his store of props.

Gérôme was in his prime at the time the Art Institute was established in 1879. His art had been purchased by American collectors for more than thirty years when his first work entered the museum in 1893. The five examples by Gérôme in the Art Institute, acquired over a ninety-five-year period, span his career and represent several aspects of his art. The group is comprised of three paintings, Portrait of a Lady (Rosine Faivre?) (1851), The Chariot Race (1876), and Love Conquers All (1889); and two sculptures, Anacreon with the Infants Bacchus and Cupid (1881), and Bonaparte Entering Cairo (1897).

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904)

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654)1 is one of the most prominent female artists of the Baroque period, and because of both her artistic talent and her highly fascinating personal history, she is also one of the most researched as well.

Artemisia Gentileschi was born on July 8th, 1593, in Rome. She was the first child of Orazio, a painter who gained a mild amount of success.

She began her apprenticeship in her father’s studio as a teenager. Her father was an established but middling painter until his work was transformed by his encounter with Caravaggio in 1600.

By 1610, at the age of 17, Artemisia had created the stunning painting Susanna and the Elders, in which a beautiful maiden is spied on in her bath by two lascivious old men.

Gentileschi is widely known for her portrayals of strong heroines, usually doing bloody deeds to deserving males. In nearly all of her work, women are depicted as virtuous, strong and determined, while men are shown as threatening, diabolical or receiving a justly deserved punishment.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s most prominent use of Biblical tales to reflect her experiences asa woman is through the painting ​Judith Slaying Holofernes​, which she completed from 1611 to1612. It portrays the Biblical Judith, a socially liberated heroine, beheading the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes, whose armies had invaded Israel. He had also possibly attempted to sexually assault Judith.

Artemisia Gentileschi

Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920)

Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, where he grew up in a Jewish ghetto. His father, Flaminio, came from a line of successful businessmen who suffered a reversal of fortune and declared bankruptcy shortly before Amedeo’s birth. His mother, Eugenia Garsin, descended from an intellectual Jewish family, and she passed her love of culture and learning to her son.

From his early teens, Modigliani resolved to become an artist. In 1898, he began to study with local plein-air painter Guglielmo Micheli, who stressed working directly from nature. Modigliani also was exposed to a wide variety of Italian art over the course of travels through his home country, where he received formal training in Florence and in Venice.

While studying in Venice in 1903, Modigliani met a Chilean artist, Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, who told him tales of life in Paris and its bohemian center, Montmartre. In 1906 he moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and other leading artists of his era. In Paris, he was influenced by fauvism, the avant-garde art movement promoting a strong, emotional, and nonrealistic use of color, and by his friend the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, known for his artistic search of pure form.

Modigliani was also influenced by African carvings and masks, particularly in his early work, which was mostly sculpture. In 1908 he first exhibited his works in Paris at Salon des Independants. In 1909 he established himself near the workshop operated by Brancusi, whose sculpture interested him as much as the lines synthesis found in African images. In 1914, the Polish poet Zborowsky became his marchand and an important influence of his work. He died January 25, 1920.
Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920)

Brief biography of John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is a distinguished British painter from the mid-nineteenth century. Millais was born in Southampton to John Millais, self-professed “gentleman”, and Mary Evamy, daughter of a Southampton merchant and he from a young age showed a prodigious talent for drawing.

His family moved to London to foster his artistic talent and at the age of 11 he became the youngest-ever student at the Royal Academy Schools.

He is celebrated for his prolific career, but is best known for his founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, along with fellow British artists William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The Brotherhood was founded in opposition to contemporary academic painting, which the group believed was the result of the example set by Raphael and which had dominated the schools and academies since his time.

Inspired by the principles of realism and truth to nature, Millais painted some of his best-known works including Christ in the House of his Parents (1849–50) and Mariana (1851). In breaking with painterly conventions of the time, these and other Pre-Raphaelite works were seen as radical and received both criticism and praise. Millais died at home in 1896 and is buried at Artists Corner.
Brief biography of John Everett Millais

Émile Bernard(1868-1941)

Émile Bernard is known as a Post-Impressionist painter who had artistic friendships with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Eugène Boch, and at a later time, Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism, two late 19th century art movements.

Émile Henri Bernard was born in Lille, France in 1868. The family moved to Paris in 1878, where Émile attended the Collège Sainte-Barbe. He began his studies at the École des Arts Décoratifs. He is very intelligent at a young age, so Bernard goes to the Académie Cormon in 1884 where he meets Louis Anquetin (1861-1932), Toulouse Lautrec (1864-1901), and Van Gogh (1853-1890).

In 1884 he joined the Atelier Cormon where he experimented with impressionism and pointillism and befriended fellow artists Louis Anquetin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. After being suspended from the École des Beaux-Arts for "showing expressive tendencies in his paintings", he toured Brittany on foot, where he was enamored by the tradition and landscape.

In 1887, he invents Cloisonnism with Anquetin. This movement is the opposite of Impressionism because the subjects are more simplified, the surfaces in the compositions are outlined in black, the colors are pure and juxtaposed, and they tried to make the placements of their subjects unordinary/original.

1893 is a very important year in Bernard's life: he paints his famous Enterrement de Vincent Van Gogh, and his first exhibition is dedicated to that painting. In the same year he leaves France to go to Italy, and then he goes to Egypt where he will stay there for ten years.
Emile Bernard (1868-1941)

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520), known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance.

His family name was Sanzio: he was born in the city of Urbino, in the pontificate of Sixtus IV. His father, Giovanni Sanzio, was a painter for court of Urbino but of no professional celebrity, he was considered to possess superior judgment.

In the court of Urbino, Raphael was exposed to some of the best artists and thinkers from around the world, Because of his father’s connections in the court, Raphael began training to be an artist.

The great fame of Michael Angelo Buonaroti, and Leonardo da Vinci, induced him to visit Florence and the careful examination of the works of those eminent artists enlarges his ideas and enabled him to improve his style.

After residence of some time at Florence Raphael, was recalled to Urbino by the death of his parents. He remained there to execute some works for the duke and the churches and then return to Florence where he continued his laborers and studies.

His reputation afterwards called him to Rome in 1509, where Pope Julius II, employed him in decorating with frescoes the chambers of the Vatican. Pope hired Raphael as scriptor brevium. It was here that he first displayed the full extent of his admirable genius; and his pictures of the doctors of the churches and the school of Athens are still regarded as some of the most wonderful production of the art.
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

Edouard Manet (1832–83)

Edouard Manet was born in Paris at 5 rue des Petits-Augustins (now rue Bonaparte) on January 23, 1832. He was eldest son of Auguste Manet (1797-1862), a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministere de la Justice, and Eugenie-Desiree Fournier (1811-1895), the daughter of a French diplomat posted to Stockholm.

He had two brothers: Eugene, born a year later and Gustave, born in 1835. The Mantes were quite wealthy, and they love in a four-storey Left Bank apartment house across the street from L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the top art school in France at the time.

He was interested in drawing which his maternal uncle Edmond Fournier strongly supported and encouraged. Manet, a mediocre student at the Institute Poiloup, transfers to the fifth form of the Rollin School, where he meets An- tonin Proust, who becomes a lifelong friend. The two friends often visit the Louvre together, under the guidance of Fournier.

La femme au chat

In 1851, the two friends witnessed the boot coup d‘etat of Napoleon III. Manet sketches the dead on the street. Both are arrested during skirmished and detained for a few night.

Edouard Manet’s work contained elements of both Impressionism and Realism, put his own cat into some of his paintings. This comfortable moggie, the epitome of respectability, is seen, for instance, in La femme au chat, a portrait of Manet's wife.

Manet offered a glimpse of sophisticated Parisian society in his painting the Masked Ball at the Opera (1873). This work was supposedly inspired by the mass of masked young men and women who attended the centennial opening in Paris of The Marriage of Figaro, written by Pierre de Beaumarchais before the revolution.
Edouard Manet (1832–1883)

Adolphe Monticelli

Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli (October 14, 1824 – June 29, 1886) was born in Marseilles, France. Monticelli came from a modest family of Italian extradition and inherited a spirited southern temperament. He studied painting at the École Municipale de Dessin from 1842 to 1846.

At that time, the school was directed by Emile Loubon who encouraged his students to paint directly from nature.

Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli

Monticelli moved to Paris in 1846 at the age of twenty-two and entered the École des Beaux-Arts under Delaroche. However his style was far more deeply affected by his work in the Louvre, where he spent much time copying paintings by the old masters.

After three years in Paris Monticelli returned in 1849 to Marseilles and spent greater part of his time there until 1863. He then re-established himself in Paris and stayed there for seven years. In 1856 he met Diaz de la Pena, who encouraged him to use bolder colors and a heavier texture.

The Court of the Princess

Monticelli is regarded as a forefather of Abstract Expressionism due to his liberal use of dazzling colors applied with thick impasto. Among his panting: The Court of the Princess, Flowers’ in a Blue Vase, Four Figures.
Adolphe Monticelli

Émile Bernard (28 April 1868 – 16 April 1941)

Émile Henri Bernard was born on April 28, 1868 in Lille, France. Located in the north near the Belgian border.

Lille is famous for its textile industry. Lille had many places for Émile to explore, one of his favorite was an art studio that made stained glass windows.

In 1877 Émile attends the College de la Monnaie in Lille and lives with his maternal grandmother, Sophie Bodin-Lallement, who runs a successful laundry business. He is encouraged to draw by his grandmother’s lodger.

The spirited 18 year old decided to study on his own by taking a six month tour of the French countryside - on foot. His plan was to explore the regions of Normandy and Britannic sketching the landscape and painting canvases along the way.

Van Gogh met Bernard in 1886 at the Cormon studio, where they were both studying painting, Bernard was intelligent and very talented young artist at that time. Bernard had completed many paintings by the time he returned to Paris that autumn.

Bernard seems to have had a stimulating effect on his great colleague but thereafter his work as painter declined in importance and he became of interest chiefly for his activities as a writer.
Émile Bernard (28 April 1868 – 16 April 1941)

Biography of Sandro Botticelli

Florentine painter (1445-1510) Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi or known as Sandro Botticelli was born in Florence, Italy.

He illustrated Cristoforo Landino’s edition of the Commedia in the 1480s and became the first great serial artist of the poem to use the discursive method: following the text sequentially or episodically rather than approaching it synoptically.

Sandro Botticelli: Self Portrait

As a youth he may have been apprenticed to a goldsmith and je later trained with Fra Filippo Lippi in Florence. By 1470 he had developed a distinctive style and was established as a master.

Between 1473 and 1474 , he was asked to paint St. Sebastian in Florence’s Church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

The Birth of Venus

In 1481 he was among a team of Florentine and Umbrian artists called to Rome to decorate the Sistine Chapel; three of his finest religious frescoes (complete in 1482).

Among his greatest w9riks are the Primavera, Pallas and the Centaur, Venus and Mars and The Birth of Venus all painted c. 1477-90. Botticelli died in Florence on May 17, 1510.
Biography of Sandro Botticelli

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

Considered one of the greatest Graphic Artists in history, Albrecht Dürer elevated printmaking to the level of painting through his unprecedented use of line and value.  Albrecht Durer, born on May 21, 147, was the third of 18 children born to Albrecht Dürer, a goldsmith who had moved to Nuremberg, Germany from the Kingdom of Hungary and Barbara Holfer, the daughter of Albrecht Dürer the Elder’s master.

His precocious skill is evidenced by a remarkable self-portrait done in 1484, when he was 13 years old, and by a Madonna with Musical Angels, done in 1485, which is already a finished work of art in the late Gothic style.

Die Satyfamilie by Albrecht Dürer

In 1486, Dürer was apprenticed to the well-known Nuremberg artist Michael Wolgemut, from whom he learned the fundamentals of painting and printmaking.

After his three year’s apprenticeship was over Dürer went on travel for four years. He went of Venice, certainly to Colmar where the works of Martin Schongauer impressed him.

Through his life, Dürer had significant contact to individuals with health problems and with disabilities.

In 1498 appeared Dürer’s sixteen great woodcuts of the ‘Apocalypse; which introduced a new epoch in the art of wood-engraving. In 1507, he journeyed home, where he formed a school and pupils and apprentices gathered around him.

Dürer built his reputation with graphic works such as the Large Passion and Small Passion and the Life of the Virgin, which were published in 1511, as well as by accepting painting commission.
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent William van Gogh was born in 1853 at Groot Zundert, a little village in the Dutch province of Brabant, not far from the border between Holland and Belgium. Deeply religious, he studied for the priesthood but never passed the entrance exam for theology school.

The van Gogh family had, for centuries, given men of note to Holland especially as clergymen and in commerce; in the nineteenth century several members of the family were art dealer.

At 16 he became an assistant (1869-76) with an international firm of art dealers in their shops in The Hague, London and Paris.

In May 1876, he becomes a teacher in a school at Ramsgate. In April 1881, he set off for Brussels to study art, where his family encouraged him to take painting lessons.

He settled in The Hague where he lived with his model Christien, a prostitute. She appears in the drawing Sorrow (1882) and Sien Posing (1883).

Van Gogh began studying painting with Anton Mauve in January 1882. Van Gogh’s burst of creativity between 1885 and 1890 was his most productive interval. Especially after moving to Paris in 1886, van Gogh produced one classic painting after another at a manic pace fueled by both absinthe and his growing mental instability – producing more than 200 painting in the two years after his move.

Van Gogh has been acknowledged as a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism and has had an enormous influence on 20th century art.

In 1890 he went to live at Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, under the supervision of a physician, Dr Paul Gachet, himself an amateur painter and engraver, whom van Gogh painted.

On July 27, 1890, van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding Cornfields with Flight of Birds, and died two days later.
Vincent van Gogh

Biography of Beckman, Max – German painter and graphic artist

Biography of Beckman, Max – German painter and graphic artist
Born in Leipzig, Beckman studied at the Weimar Academy (1900-1903) and then worked in Berlin. His early paintings were influenced by impressionism, and he also produced works with biblical and mythological themes, reflecting his admiration of medieval art. At the start of World War 1 (1914) he served as a medical orderly but was discharged following a nervous breakdown. These experiences of war profoundly influenced his later work.

Settling in Frankfurt in 1915, he began to paint figurative composition conveying a harsh vision of an evil and malicious contemporary world. Brutality and oppressive apathy permeate these picture as in The Night (1919), a scene torture that like many of his work, reflects a social reality of the time as well as being a powerful symbolic composition. This combination of realism with allegorical and symbolic significance has been described as transcendental realism. Certain symbolic objects, such as candles and musical instruments recur in his pictures. His characteristics style was one of simplified forms in a crowded almost two dimensional space. He also painted a number of self portraits.

Beckman was dismissed from his teaching post in Frankfurt by the Nazis in 1933, the same year he painted Robbery of Europe and the triptych Departure. He went first to Berlin, then to Paris and Amsterdam, and finally (in 1947) to the United States, where he taught a produced work that was lighter and less harsh. In the last two years of his life Beckman received academic honors and prizes in the United States and at the Venice Biennale.
Biography of Beckman, Max – German painter and graphic artist