ABSTRACT

The German painter Max Beckmann came to the United States in 1947. In the period before the First World War, he worked at a distinct distance from the modern movement. He was absorbed in the Old Masters and dreamed of emulating their epic scale and tragic grandeur. It was not, then, by means of an aesthetic conversion that Beckmann became a modern painter, but through his experience in the war. He volunteered as a medical orderly when the war began, and the next year—1915—was seriously wounded. While recuperating in a Frankfurt hospital, he resumed his work as an artist, but was now to he an artist of a very different sort. It was in this period that Beckmann's work began to acquire the compression and intensity—that sense of emotion barely able to contain itself within the strategies of pictorial discourse—which were to become the dominant characteristics of his mature style.