The Theatre of the Real

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) can be classed as an expressionist; his initiatory influences were William Blake and Edgar Munch, however, he never belonged to any particular group or school. He approached his subjects with an enormous tension. No aspects of the real world or the imagined were foreign to him. He painted ancient battles and love scenes as well as peaceful landscapes and bright flowers, stories from the New Testament, Greek and pagan mythology, modern city life, dreams, precisely depicted genre scenes and remarkably faithful portraits. Of his generation, only Oskar Kokoschka came close to his thematic variety. Beckmann was writing all his life. His theoretical essays, aphorisms, interviews, letters and diaries, written in a refined language, open for the reader the world of this non-conformist painter set against the backdrop of a period fundamentally affected by war.