In December 1950, the German Expressionist Max Beckmann set out from his Manhattan apartment to see his Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket, on view at The Met, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Inspired by the poignant circumstances of the artist’s death, Max Beckmann in New York focuses on 40 beautifully illustrated works that Beckmann painted in the city during the last 16 months of his life, as well as earlier works in New York collections. An informative and accessible essay by art historian Sabine Rewald, as well as detailed catalogue entries for each work and generous excerpts from the artist’s letters, diaries, and ephemera, illuminate Beckmann’s difficult and tumultuous life and make this an essential volume for anyone interested in the artist.
One of the most important German artists of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann was labeled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis and chose exile. His artistic production encompassed the realism and figural themes of his early works to the provocatively blunt portraiture, critical urban views, and richly layered symbolic works for which he is now universally recognized. Although he was a prolific writer, his written work has never before been collected and translated into English. Beckmann is known for the depth, pungency, and tremendous sensuous force of his works; only in the last twenty years have we come to learn more about his personal life. Self-Portrait in Words maps out Beckmann's life and draws attention to the occasions on or for which he produced his writings, to the importance writing had for him as a form of expression, and to both the contemporary and personal references of his ideas and images.
Featuring a broad selection of paintings, sculptures and photographs coming mainly from the Centre Pompidou collections, Louvre Abu Dhabi’s exhibition catalogue “Rendezvous in Paris: Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani & Co.” focuses on this highly distinctive period in French art when young painters, sculptors and photographers flocked to early-20th-century Paris from all over the world to make a decisive contribution to the city’s art scene. Most notably from Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia and even Japan, these formally inventive artists – Constantin Brancusi, Marc Chagall, Kees van Dongen, Tsuguharu Foujita, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso among them – who would later become known as the “School of Paris”, rivalled the greatest French artists of the time.
Max Beckmann is widely regarded as one of the most important figurative painters of the last hundred years. On My Painting can give a valuable insight into understanding his work. It was composed in 1938 at a crucial jucture in Beckmann's life, and was read by him at the opening of the Twentieth Century German Art exhibition.
Although Max Liebermann (1847–1935) began his career as a realist painter depicting scenes of rural labor, Dutch village life, and the countryside, by the turn of the century, his paintings had evolved into colorful images of bourgeois life and leisure that critics associated with French impressionism. During a time of increasing German nationalism, his paintings and cultural politics sparked numerous aesthetic and political controversies. His eminent career and his reputation intersected with the dramatic and violent events of modern German history from the Empire to the Third Reich. The Nazis’ persecution of modern and Jewish artists led to the obliteration of Liebermann from the narratives of modern art, but this volume contributes to the recent wave of scholarly literature that works to recover his role and his oeuvre from an international perspective.