Max Beckmann directed by Michael Trabitzsch, Artists on Film Screening

Max Beckmann is a documentary exploring the life of the artist using archive footage. Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884 and died in New York in 1950. He was a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and teacher, and is considered one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. Beckmann wanted to paint from his earliest days as a child, studying first in Weimar and later in Berlin, before winning an art prize that allowed him to study in Florence. From the beginning of his career Beckmann was influenced by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, and also paid close attention to the work of earlier European painters such as Breughel and Grünewald. After enduring a ‘great injury to his soul’ during World War I, his work became full of horrifying imagery, and expressively distorted forms reflecting the influence of German Gothic art. In the 1930s Beckmann was persecuted by the Nazis but he continued to work, painting his celebrated secular triptychs in the late 1930s and 40s.