Max Beckmann, the Thinker-Painter

Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer born in 1884 who died in 1950. Coinciding with the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, his work became very explicit with its horrific and distorted images in a sort of combination of the aesthetics of brutal realism and an unveiled social commentary. The British Museum dedicates an exhibition to this artist thanks to the bequest of his former student Marie-Louise von Motesiczky who had received a significant group of prints and drawings from Beckmann. The exhibition focuses on a group of five drawings and three prints that cover the artist's career from the 1920s to 1947, when he and his wife Quappi finally left Europe for the United States.