Max Beckmann—Homage to a German Modernist and Abstract Expressionist

The Abstract Expressionist painter of Germany, Max Beckmann, was one among the most celebrated living artists in his country during the troubled years of Weimar Republic (1919-33). Soon it was Nazis who took charge and designated Max Beckmann to be a degenerate artist. It was leading up to the darkest era in the history of Germany and soon all his works were about to be confiscated by the Nazis who called it Degenerate art. He left Germany with his wife, Mathilde, better known as Quappi, in the year 1937 just before the exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ commenced. Expecting the horror the couple left for Amsterdam where they settled their base till 1947. Nearly a decade later their visa for United States were granted and they were able to move to the States. Here Max Beckmann stayed for next two years and taught at the Washington University in St. Louis. He lived in New York City in the last years of his life until his death in 1950.

 

At the time of Max Beckmann’s arrival in New York, it wasn’t quite favorable for the artist; it was a propitious period for his kind of art that dealt with complex allegorical narratives in painting. During the 1950s, his art was unparalleled compared to his contemporaries. Max Beckmann’s Abstract Expressionists style would overshadow the brilliance of all the other art personalities reigning in the minds of the vast art world intelligentsia. Max Beckmann’s art is among the best documentation of the adversities of Nazi Germany. Max Beckmann’s works like none other capture the raw realities that can be checked online. Buy Max Beckmann’s paintings art and explore the paintings of the Nazi Germany.

Besides the painterly urgency of Max Beckmann’s art, much of its power resided in its inventions of the metaphors. For example, “Bird’s Hell” created in 1938 was a symbolization of a political commentary; it was the metaphors that masked what it was in a darkly comical fantasy shaped to hide the true gores. The painting depicted a multitude of monstrously with anthropomorphized birds captured in the setting of a candlelit room. One among them tortures a hogtied man using a knife and carves bloody lines into his back. And at the centre of the picture is a furious blue figure with arm raised in a salute of “Sieg heil”, a gesture copied by all the other birds in the background. The picture is bang on point in capturing the terror of the time, the sociopathic ferocity of Nazism so aptly and so vividly. Max Beckmann’s works are commentary on the time and the paintings demand a closer look. All Max Beckmann’s paintings are available online. Buy Max Beckmann’s art. 

Max Beckmann’s art bring to life some of the harshest periods in art and in the world society. Max Beckmann painted his way through Nazism and stood witness to them destroying the culture of Germany in the name of purification. He stood witness to the horrors of Nazism that meticulously shattered German modernism and the works of his fellow modernists. His life was made miserable with the mockery of the ‘degenerate’ show and with the events that followed surviving in Amsterdam till finally he got his way through United Stated. Max Beckmann’s paintings during the troubled times show the firsthand accounts of the horror and deserve a closer exposure. Max Beckmann’s art is available online for the followers of German Modernist paintings. Max Beckmann’s artistic life works as an eye opener especially in a time like this, which has many characteristics resembling to the then Germany not to mention the Nazi flags and the marches of the Neo Nazis. Max Beckmann’s portraiture of the time can indicate a direct consequence of such voices which might lead up to greater adversities, let’s hope not as much as the Nazi Germany.

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