MAX BECKMANN: THE BOURGEOIS “DEGENERATE”
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer active during the early 20th century. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist due to the deliberate degree of unfinished, figurative and perspectival distortion, he rejected both the term and the movement. The critical social commentary evident in his art has long disturbed contemporary viewers.
Join the University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor of Art History Emerita Barbara Copeland Buenger as she traces the trajectory of the thoroughly bourgeois and seemingly apolitical Max Beckmann. From his post-World War I “new beginning” in Frankfurt through his 1933 Nazi dismissal from his teaching post and move to Berlin, to his notorious 1937 branding as “degenerate,” move to Amsterdam, and subsequent production in wartime Amsterdam and postwar America, Beckmann created art that continues to challenge the viewer to this day.
Learn more here.