Works by Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann painted and made prints of bathers, fairground acts and his own staring face; during his war service his figures and spaces twisted away from the academic correctness he started with.

Early paintings are laid on in thick, loose strokes: mourners in black stand stiffly against a red wall in Small Death Scene of 1906, and naked figures crowd a dark, broken street in Scene from the Destruction of Messina of 1909. Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly and was discharged after a breakdown in 1915, and from then on his figures and rooms bend out of true. The Night of 1918 packs people into a low attic, where a man's head is wrenched back and a woman's wrists are tied above her head.

In Women's Bath, a drypoint of 1922 and one of many prints below, bathers wade in a packed, flattened pool while a woman dives head first from above. For the drypoint portfolio Jahrmarkt (Annual Fair) he cast friends and his wife Minna as travelling showpeople, and in The Tightrope Walkers a woman in striped tights shares the rope with a hooded figure gripping a long pole.

He painted himself throughout his life; in Self-Portrait with Red Scarf of 1917 he sits shaven-headed before a pale window, eyes wide and teeth bared. Beckmann rejected the Expressionist label, and in the 1920s he was linked with New Objectivity. By The Catfish of 1929 the outlines are heavy and black, and a figure in a headscarf hugs a huge blue fish against a pale sky.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Alte Nationalgalerie, Saint Louis Art Museum, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Cleveland Museum of Art.