Max Beckmann: Exile in Amsterdam
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Max Beckmann: Exile in Amsterdam Details
About the Author Max Beckmannwas born in Leipzig in 1884 to a family of farmers. He began his formal studies in 1900 at the Weimar Art Academy and moved to Paris soon after with his new wife. Drafted into World War I, he was deemed unfit to serve in the Second, and spent the war years in Germany, outlawed by Hitler from exhibiting his "degenerate" paintings. After the war, he came to America, taking up the post of Painter-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In the late 1940s he moved to Manhattan, where he died of a heart attack en route to see his work in a show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 27, 1950. Read more
Reviews
Max Beckmann was among the most talented artists working in the first half of the Twentieth Century. An ambulance driver for Germany in the first World War, invalidated out of service after suffering a nervous breakdown, he spent the second World War as a German self-exile living in Amsterdam, where he was constantly under threat of being conscripted despite his age. Partly as a consequence of these nerve-wracking experiences, partly because Hitler did not approve of his modern form of art, partly because he was an associate, friend and object of patronage of persons of Jewish descent whom he was always in danger of joining in the death camps, he was frequently locked in the grip of depression or deep anxiety. However, being an artist of the first rank, he transformed these experiences into paintings and works on paper of the most profound and memorable sort.This fine book covers the period of his life spent in Amsterdam to which he and his wife moved after he had been listed among Germany's Degenerate Artists. Thanks to his friends and associates, as well as his son, a German military physician, he was able to avoid the worst of what might have happened to him while producing some of his very finest work. With the aid of excellent reproductions and penetrating analysis by the authors in the light of his personal correspondence and diaries, we are able to understand better the often difficult pictures to which his wide-ranging reading and thought gave birth. Where no reasonably sound hypothesis can be found for an aspect of a picture, the authors have the courage simply to say that they do not apprehend what he might be getting at.All in all, this stacks up as one of the must have monographs for those interested in European art of the Twentieth Century as well as anyone interested in the impact of Europe's catastrophe upon an independent-minded artist who knew that there was no escape from its consequences.