Max Beckmann

Paris Society is Max Beckmann’s portrait of émigrés, aristocrats, businessmen, and intellectuals engaged in disjointed festivity on the eve of the Third Reich. Beckmann painted the work on an invitation from the German embassy in Paris…

Works in the MOMA collection

ax Beckmann’s outstanding artistic production has been illuminated in numerous important exhibitions in recent decades. It is therefore all the more astonishing that Beckmann has yet to be assessed as a “painter on paper.” The Schirn presents more than a hundred watercolors and pastels, some of which are large formats, that offer the first opportunity to view together essential aspects of works that have been dispersed throughout the world. This major overview, for which the Schirn will publish the first catalogue raisonné of Beckmann’s watercolors, will make it evident how important these works in a technique often described as ephemeral were for the artist. In contrast to the paintings, in which the problems of history and human existence are condensed, his watercolors show humor, legerity, and charming spontaneity, revealing a facet of this great master of modernism that has been little appreciated.

Works in the TATE collection

Biography

Beckmann’s self-portrait is the headliner for a summer airing of the museum’s permanent collection of German and Austrian works from the beginning of the 20th century. Austrians are showcased on the second floor. Here are the Leonard Lauder and Serge Sabarsky collections of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele — the museum’s mother lode — together with jewelry from the Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshop…