Max Beckmann

'Rugby players' Max Beckmann exhibition poster Musée National d'Art Moderne

1968

Max Beckmann was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century - both as a painter and as an outstanding graphic artist. Printmaking was the main medium he worked in between 1914 and 1924, creating a total of 156 drypoints, 72 lithographs and 16 woodcuts. From wikipedia: Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 27, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement.[1] In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and social criticism, coinciding with the rise of nazism in Germany.