Beckmann, Max

(born Feb. 12, 1884, Leipzig, Ger.—died Dec. 27, 1950, New York, N.Y., U.S.) German Expressionist painter and graphic artist. After training at the conservative Weimar Academy, in 1903 he moved to Berlin and joined the Berlin Sezession. His experience as a medical orderly in World War I changed his outlook, and his work became full of horrifying imagery, with deliberately repulsive colours and erratic forms. He considered his work to be a combination of brutal realism and social commentary. In 1933 the Nazis declared his art “degenerate” and forced him to resign his professorship at the Städel School of Art in Frankfurt. In 1937 he fled to Amsterdam, and in 1947 he moved to the U.S., where he taught in St. Louis, Mo., and New York City.

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