Max Beckmann
Went to the First World War as a medical orderly and painted Germany's next thirty years from the inside.
Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884 and was already a successful painter before 1914. He volunteered as a medical orderly, was discharged after a breakdown in 1915, and everything afterwards is marked by it. Through the 1920s he painted the Weimar republic in hard, compressed, stage-like compositions, teaching in Frankfurt until the Nazis dismissed him in 1933 and included his work in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. He left Germany the day it opened, spent ten years in Amsterdam, much of it in hiding, and reached the United States in 1947. He died in New York in 1950, walking to see one of his own paintings.
Provenance for a Beckmann means Second World War provenance, and any work with a gap in its ownership between 1933 and 1945 requires proper restitution research before it can be sold — this is the single largest factor in whether a picture is saleable at all. Beyond the paintings there is a substantial and important graphic output, particularly the drypoints and lithographic portfolios of the 1910s and 1920s, which are catalogued by Hofmaier and where state, edition and paper are what separate impressions.
If you own a work by Max Beckmann
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.