1884-1950 was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is usually classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. He was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Saxony. From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. His traumatic experiences of World War I, in which he served as a medic, coincided with a dramatic transformation of his style from academically correct depictions to a distortion of both figure and space, reflecting his altered vision of himself and humanity.He is known for the self-portraits he painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivalled only by Rembrandt and Picasso. Well-read in philosophy and literature, he also contemplated mysticism and theosophy in search of the "Self". As a true painter-thinker, he strove to find the hidden spiritual dimension in his subjects. (Beckmann's 1948 "Letters to a Woman Painter" provides a statement of his approach to art.) In the Weimar Republic of the Twenties, Beckmann enjoyed great success and official honors. In 1927 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of D??sseldorf; the National Gallery in Berlin acquired his painting The Bark and, in 1928, purchased his Self-Portrait in Tuxedo.In 1925 he was selected to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt. Some of his most famous students included Theo Garve, Leo Maillet and Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky. His fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state. In 1933, the Nazi government bizarrely called Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik"and dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums, and several of these works were put on display in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.For ten years, Beckmann lived in poverty in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam, failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the US. In 1944 the Germans attempted to draft him into the army, despite the fact that the sixty-year-old artist had suffered a heart attack. The works completed in his Amsterdam studio were even more powerful and intense than the ones of his master years in Frankfurt, and included several large triptychs, which stand as a summation of Beckmann's art. After the war, Beckmann moved to the United States, and during the last three years of his life, he taught at the art schools of Washington University in St. Louis (with the German-American painter and printmaker Werner Drewes) and the Brooklyn Museum. He suffered from angina pectoris and died after Christmas 1950, struck down by a heart attack in Manhattan.Many of his late paintings are now displayed in American museums.   Related Paintings of Max Beckmann :. | Das Nizza in Frankfurt am Main | Dance in Baden-Baden | Selbstbidnis | Self-Portrait as a Clown | Water tower in Hermsdorf |
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Paul Berthon
A truly gifted illustrator and poster artist , French , 1872-1909 French designer and lithographer. He began his training in Villefranche, where he studied painting, and in 1893 he moved to Paris, entering the Ecole Normale d'Enseignement du Dessin. There he became a pupil and disciple of Eug?ne-Samuel Grasset, the Professor of Decorative Arts, and was also influenced by Luc Olivier Merson. Berthon's main output consisted of posters and decorative panels. However, he also produced bookbindings and furniture designs, both of which he exhibited at the Salon in 1895; designs for ceramics for Villeroy & Boch in the late 1890s; and a few designs for the covers of such magazines as L'Image (July 1897) and Poster (May 1899). His work is in an Art Nouveau style, and he adopted that movement's plant and figural motifs, especially the motif of the femme fatale, and also its long sinuous lines.
Frederick Sandys
English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, ca.1829-1904 English painter, illustrator and draughtsman. He was the son of Anthony Sands (1804-83), a minor local artist. He began his artistic education with his father and attended the Norwich School of Design from 1846. His precocious talent was recognized by the award of silver medals by the Society of Arts in 1846 and 1847. He moved to London in 1851, when he first exhibited at the Royal Academy, but he continued to spend time at Norwich until the death of his parents in 1883. After publishing in 1857 A Nightmare, a gentle caricature of John Ruskin and his Pre-Raphaelite proteg's William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and based on Millais's Sir Isumbras at the Ford
Theodore Wores
American Painter, ca.1859-1939,was an American painter born in San Francisco. Wores began his art training at age twelve in the studio of Joseph Harrington, who taught him color, composition, drawing and perspective. When the San Francisco School of Design opened in 1874, Wores was one of the first pupils to enroll. After one year at that school under the landscape painter Virgil Macey Williams, he continued his art education at the Royal Academy in Munich where he spent six years. He also painted with William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck. Wores returned to San Francisco in 1881. He went to Japan for two extended visits and had successful exhibitions of his Japanese paintings in New York and London, where he became friends with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. He visited Hawaii and Samoa in 1901-1902 and established a home in San Francisco about 1906. He visited Hawaii for a second time in 1910?C1911. For the remainder of his career, Wores painted the coast on the western edge of San Francisco. He died in San Francisco in 1939. His most famous work is The Lei Maker, which is on permanent display at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.