A groundbreaking exhibition opening this month at Frankfurt's Städel Museum is shedding new light on German artist Max Beckmann (1884-1950) by focusing exclusively on his often-overlooked mastery of drawing. The rare show, simply titled "Beckmann," presents 80 works that trace the development of his distinctive hard-edged style through his drawings, featuring loans from major collections across Europe and the United States.
Beckmann's paintings are instantly recognizable yet difficult to categorize within traditional art movements. Often mischaracterized as an Expressionist or, to his own frustration, labeled as a leading figure of the Weimar era's New Objectivity movement, Beckmann was fundamentally a singular and willful artist. His work featured a sharp yet ethereal color palette and a recurring cast of characters including circus performers, street toughs, and his own menacing, mask-like self-portraits.
The exhibition is curated by Regina Freyberger, Stephan von Wiese, and Hedda Finke, with the latter two preparing to publish the first two volumes of their comprehensive three-volume catalogue raisonné of Beckmann's drawings this month. The show begins by examining the decade before World War I, when Beckmann was moving away from German Impressionism and absorbing influences from French Post-Impressionism. An early self-portrait from 1912, rendered in soft pencil strokes, demonstrates techniques that could easily be mistaken for late 19th-century work.
World War I profoundly transformed both Beckmann as a person and as an artist. His service as a medic during the conflict led to an apparent psychological breakdown in 1915. However, according to curator Freyberger, this traumatic period also catalyzed his emergence as a major artist by completely reconfiguring his artistic approach. His signature hard-edged style first appeared in his drawings during this period, coinciding with a broader shift in how drawings were perceived in the art world - evolving from mere preparatory studies for paintings to autonomous works of art by the 1920s.
Personal changes also influenced Beckmann's artistic development during the 1920s. In 1925, he divorced his first wife, opera singer Minna Tube, and married Mathilde "Quappi" von Kaulbach, a Bavarian-born woman who became his enduring muse. A striking 1928 drawing of Quappi holding a candle demonstrates Beckmann's mastery of light and shadow, vividly capturing the illumination on her face and chest using only chalk and pencil on cardboard.
The rise of the Nazi regime dramatically altered Beckmann's life and work. After the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed from his prestigious teaching position at Frankfurt's art academy, ultimately forcing him into Dutch exile in 1937. The existential threats of the 1930s introduced color into his drawings for the first time. "The Murder" (1933), from the Städel's own important collection, exemplifies this period by using watercolor and gouache over charcoal to depict a chaotic crime scene rendered in unsettling pastel tones.
The exhibition's final section focuses on the last decade of Beckmann's life, beginning with the dark war years spent confined in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, followed by his restless but productive post-war period in the United States. Two works completed in Colorado in 1949 reveal the artist's complex relationship with America's cultural landscape. "Rodeo" presents a cowboy thrown into the air as a disturbing reinterpretation of his familiar circus figures, while a very late self-portrait shows Beckmann wearing an all-American cowboy hat while holding up an Old World symbol in the form of a fish, symbolizing his cultural displacement.
The exhibition "Beckmann" will run at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt from December 3, 2025, through March 15, 2026, offering visitors a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of one of Germany's most important 20th-century artists through the intimate medium of drawing.
