A retrospective of Max Beckmann’s career from before the First World War to his years in exile from Germany, first in Amsterdam and then New York

This catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, on Max Beckmann (1884–1950), one of Germany’s leading 20th-century artists. Initially close to Expressionism and New Objectivity, Beckmann developed a unique and independent pictorial style, one filled with symbolic resonances that offered a powerful account of the society of his day. Curated by Tomàs Llorens, the exhibition brings together more than fifty works, including paintings, lithographs and sculptures that cover Beckmann’s years in Germany from the period prior to World War I, when he first achieved public recognition, to the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, when he was expelled from the Frankfurt art school where he taught and was banned from exhibiting in public.

The exhibition also focuses on the artist’s years in Amsterdam and the United States where he lived after he was obliged to leave Germany. This section is based on four metaphors relating to exile, understood both literally and as the existential condition of modern man: Masks, which looks at the loss of identity associated with the condition of exile; Electric Babylon, which focuses on the modern city as the capital of exile; The Long Goodbye, which constructs a parallel between exile and death; and The Sea, a metaphor of the infinite, its powers of seduction and alienation.

Travel is a fundamental experience of human existence. For Max Beckmann it was of existential importance both in a symbolic, but also in a deeply personal sense. In the 1920s, he regularly traveled to the noble health resorts and palace hotels on the Dutch, Italian, and French coasts. His defamation as a "degenerate" artist by the Nazi regime, however, forced him to retreat, first from Frankfurt to Berlin and subsequently into exile in Amsterdam. His emigration to the United States marked the culmination of a life entwined with the longing to travel as well as uprooting, transit and exile. Max Beckmann. DEPARTURE assembles an outstanding selection of artworks and initiates a dialogue with hitherto unseen objects and materials from the Max Beckmann Archive. It shows Beckmann’s relationship to film and literature as a producer of images of aspirations and longing resonating with notions of identity and home.

About the Author:

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. A star of the Berlin Secession, Beckmann’s career was slowed by World War I and a personal crisis, but continued in the 1920s. After the Nazis forced him to resign his professorship in Frankfurt in 1933, he went into exile in Amsterdam in 1937 and subsequently emigrated to the US in 1947. Teaching in St. Louis and New York, he became the most successful German artist in the United States of his time.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) found his central theme in the loneliness of the twentieth century man, threatened by catastrophe and torn between materialism and freedom of mind and spirit. His early pictures showed the influence of Impressionism, with a preponderance of biblical, historical, and allegorical themes. World War I made a deep impression on him: somewhere between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the succinct forms and hard contours in his memorable paintings and graphic works showed man at the limit of physical and mental endurance. Later, the harshness and severity of his style softened and his colors became more radiant, but the monumentality remained. Theater, circus, and music hall became parables of human existence.

Beckmann’s work is concerned with the fundamental conditions of human existence and the tragic entanglement of the human being dependant on the whims of gods, sexuality, and society. His relentless search for knowledge, his uncompromising commitment to the picture, and his belief in the power of its form and color give his work its distinctive, fascinating character, and have earned him a high-ranking place among the artists of the twentieth century.

This monograph features more than 180 images of works from 1907 to 1950, including many of Beckmann’s famous self-portraits and triptychs (such as Temptation of 1936/1937). Biographical essays cover his war years, the twenties in Frankfurt, his exile years in Amsterdam, and his emigration to the United States where he died; additional material includes photographs on which many of his paintings are based, several exhibition shots, and images from other artists as Pablo Picasso, Eugène Delacroix, Max Ernst, and Edvard Munch that visualize Beckmann’s inspirations and context.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) found his central theme in the loneliness of twentieth-century man, threatened by catastrophe and torn between materialism and freedom of mind and spirit. His early pictures showed the influence of Impressionism, with a preponderance of biblical, historical, and allegorical themes. The first world war made a deep impression on him: somewhere between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the succinct forms and hard contours in his memorable paintings and graphic works showed man at the limit of physical and mental endurance. Later, the harshness and severity of his style softened and his colours became more radiant, but the monumentality remained. Theatre, circus, and music hall became parables of human existence. Beckmann's work is concerned with the fundamental conditions of human existence and the tragic entanglement of the human being dependant on the whims of gods, sexuality, and society. His relentless search for knowledge, his uncompromising commitment to the picture, and his belief in the power of its form and color give his work its distinctive, fascinating character, and have earned him a high-ranking place among the artists of the twentieth century.