Friday 12 February 2010

Max Beckmann

Today is the birthday of that great unclassifiable artist Max Beckmann (born 1884). That's his Moon Landscape (1925) above, representative of one of his many styles - and rather beautiful I think. I knew very little of Beckmann until the eye-opening exhibition at Tate Modern a few years ago, which showed beyond doubt that he was a major painter who had been seriously underrated. But that's the price an artist pays for not fitting conveniently into the pigeonholes of critical theory...

3 comments:

  1. The Liberation of the Palette as the Krauts would say, he shares the room with Macke and Kirchner, sit on the comfortable settee in the middle and transport yourself into the world of Expressionism and the Bauhaus.

    Don't go at the moment though but, Karnival time.

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  2. Max Beckmann was closely associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany after the start of the fist World War. Probably his best known work is "Night." Like other artist of the movement many of his paintings were commentaries of the brutality of society.

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