9 min read
On July 18, 1937, Max Beckmann heard Adolf Hitler denounce modern art in a radio address from Munich. The next day, the painter and his wife Quappi boarded a train for Amsterdam. He never set foot in Germany again, dying in New York in 1950 without once going back.
Picture the scene. A Berlin apartment, a radio set, a 53-year-old man who a decade earlier had held one of the most prestigious teaching posts in German art. Hitler was speaking at the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, promising that artists like the one listening would face consequences. Beckmann did not wait to learn what those consequences were. The following day the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich with his paintings hung as objects of ridicule. By then he was already gone.
Munich, July 18, 1937: The Broadcast
Hitler's speech inaugurated the Great German Art Exhibition, the regime's showcase of approved painting. It was broadcast nationwide. The dictator ranted against modern artists, threatening a cleansing of German culture, and one day later the state made good on the threat: the Entartete Kunst show, the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition, opened its doors in Munich to mock the very painters the speech had condemned.
Beckmann featured prominently. The Nazis confiscated more than 500 of his works from German public collections, an astonishing figure for a man who had been decorated by the state ten years before. He understood the arithmetic instantly. On July 19, he and Quappi left for the Netherlands, telling almost no one. There was no farewell exhibition, no public statement, no negotiation. A single radio broadcast, then a train.
The decisiveness matters. Other artists hesitated, hoping the storm would pass or that inner emigration might protect them. Beckmann had already spent four years watching his name disappear from museum walls. He did not gamble on improvement.
The Career He Walked Away From: Frankfurt, 1925 to 1933
To grasp what Beckmann abandoned, look at what he had built. In 1925 he was appointed to lead a master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 1927 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf. The National Gallery in Berlin bought The Bark that year and Self-Portrait in Tuxedo the next. Major retrospectives followed in Mannheim in 1928 and in Basel and Zurich in 1930. Few living German painters were held in higher official esteem.
His self-portraits track that confidence. Beckmann painted himself throughout his life with a frequency and intensity that art historians compare only to Rembrandt and Picasso, and the 1923 Self-Portrait with a Cigarette shows him at the start of the Frankfurt ascent: watchful, self-possessed, a man taking his own measure.
Self-Portrait with a Cigarette, Max Beckmann, 1923. View print options
The same year produced Before the Masked Ball, a room of figures caught in the strange pause before a party begins, a woman with a tambourine, a blue harlequin slumped in profile, an old woman standing at the edge, a girl cradling a small light, and at the center a single masked man leaning back with a cigarette. Even here, at the height of Weimar festivity, Beckmann lets unease seep in. His light subjects were never light. The lone mask reads less as fancy dress than as a comment on a society performing normality while the ground shifted underneath it, which is precisely what Weimar Germany was doing as its currency collapsed.
Before the Masked Ball, Max Beckmann, 1923. View print options
"Cultural Bolshevik": Four Years of Erasure, 1933 to 1937
The reversal came fast. In 1933 the new Nazi government branded Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik" and dismissed him from his Städelschule professorship. He moved from Frankfurt to Berlin, hoping the capital's anonymity would offer cover. It offered four years, no more.
Paris Society, finished in 1931, now reads like a portrait of the world about to be dismantled. Beckmann filled it with German expatriates, diplomats and financiers gathered for an evening reception, their formal wear doing little to disguise a collective exhaustion. Today the painting hangs in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, itself an exile of sorts. Looking at these weary celebrants, you see a class going through the motions of an evening it no longer believes in.
Paris Society, Max Beckmann, 1931. View print options
Between 1933 and 1937 Beckmann exhibited almost nowhere in Germany. Museums quietly removed his canvases. The man who had painted the calm Seascape with Poplars in 1924, one of his rare images of open water and sky without human anxiety, was now producing work in near total public silence. That seascape, made during a summer of Weimar stability, would later look like a memory of a country that no longer existed.
Ten Years Above a Tobacco Storeroom: Amsterdam, 1937 to 1947
In Amsterdam, Beckmann set up a studio in a former tobacco storeroom near the Rokin. He stayed a decade, through the German occupation of the Netherlands, painting some of the fiercest pictures of his life while trying to remain invisible to the regime he had fled.
Birds' Hell, completed in 1938, is the rage he could not voice in public. The painting imagines a torture chamber run by monstrous bird creatures, and the meaning of Birds' Hell has never been seriously disputed: it is an allegory of Nazi Germany, painted by a man watching his homeland from across the border. Beckmann kept this fury in the studio, much as Goya once painted Saturn Devouring His Son on his own dining-room wall and never meant anyone to see it. Some pictures are made because the artist cannot not make them.
Birds' Hell, Max Beckmann, 1938. View print options
The same year brought something gentler. Still Life with Tulips and View of the Sea pairs the most Dutch of flowers with a window onto open water, and it is hard not to read it as the exile taking stock of his new country: cut blooms in a vase, the sea as both barrier and escape route. This canvas is the natural entry point, luminous where Birds' Hell burns.
Still Life with Tulips and View of the Sea, Max Beckmann, 1938. View print options
The war years narrowed his world to interiors. Bar Brown, from 1944, was painted while Amsterdam endured occupation and the approach of the Hunger Winter. A bar scene, in that context, is not entertainment. It is a record of people holding on to ritual, a drink, a conversation, while history grinds outside the door. The Amsterdam exile paintings share this double register: ordinary settings, extraordinary pressure.
Bar Brown, Max Beckmann, 1944. View print options
St. Louis and New York: The Last Three Years
In 1947 Beckmann accepted a teaching position at Washington University in St. Louis and crossed the Atlantic. Before leaving Europe he painted Café Hotel de l'Europe, named for the grand Amsterdam hotel on the Amstel. It is a farewell picture in all but title: the café life of the city that had sheltered him for ten years, set down one last time before departure. The palette has the loosened, almost celebratory quality of his postwar work, a man who survived and knows it.
Café Hotel de l'Europe, Max Beckmann, 1947. View print options
America gave him three productive years, teaching, painting, writing. His 1948 Letters to a Woman Painter distilled a lifetime of thinking about art's spiritual dimension. He died on December 27, 1950, on a New York street, on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is a strange kinship here with Gustav Klimt, who left a painting of a cradle unfinished on his easel when he died in 1918: both men were taken mid-stride, still fully at work, their last acts pointed toward the studio and the museum rather than away from them.
Beckmann vs Expressionism: Why He Refused the Label
Histories file Beckmann under Expressionism, and he hated it. He rejected both the term and the movement, objecting to what he saw as its introverted emotionalism. In the 1920s he aligned instead with the New Objectivity, the Neue Sachlichkeit, which demanded cool observation of the real world rather than inner turmoil splashed onto canvas.
The distinction is visible in the work. An Expressionist distorts to express feeling; Beckmann distorted to tell the truth about what he observed, which after 1914 included a world war he served in as a medical orderly until a nervous breakdown ended his service. His figures are compressed and his spaces tilted not because he felt strongly but because the world he documented had actually broken. That documentary ferocity separates him from purely abstract contemporaries, though readers drawn to the period's formal experiments will find the parallel current well represented in our cubism and abstract art prints collection. Beckmann watched Picasso closely all his life. He just refused to let the figure go.
If the exile story is what moves you, three of these works belong in the same room: Self-Portrait with a Cigarette for the man before the fall, Birds' Hell for the reckoning, and Café Hotel de l'Europe for the survival. Hung together they compress 25 years of European catastrophe into one wall. Beckmann's own instinct for self-invention had precedents; painters have arrived at greatness by every possible route, as the case of Carl Spitzweg, the trained pharmacist who never took a formal painting lesson, cheerfully proves.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What happened on July 18, 1937 that made Max Beckmann leave Germany?
Hitler delivered a radio address at the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, condemning modern art and threatening its makers. Beckmann heard the broadcast and departed for Amsterdam with his wife Quappi the very next day, July 19, 1937, the same day the Degenerate Art exhibition opened. He never returned to Germany.
Where can you see Max Beckmann's paintings today?
Major holdings include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which owns Paris Society, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. His work returned to German museums after 1945, decades after the Nazis had confiscated more than 500 of his pieces.
Why did Max Beckmann reject the Expressionist label?
Beckmann objected to Expressionism's introverted emotionalism and insisted his distortions served observation, not feeling. In the 1920s he was associated instead with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), which favored unsentimental engagement with the real world.
What is the meaning of Birds' Hell by Max Beckmann?
Painted in Amsterdam exile in 1938, Birds' Hell depicts a torture chamber ruled by monstrous bird creatures and is universally read as an allegory of Nazi Germany. It is Beckmann's most direct political statement, made in private by an artist the regime had branded a cultural Bolshevik.
How did Max Beckmann die?
He died of a heart attack on a New York street on December 27, 1950, while walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had emigrated to the United States in 1947 to teach at Washington University in St. Louis, having spent the previous decade in Amsterdam.
Julian Mercer
Julian Mercer writes about modern and abstract art for Symbol Art Gallery. He likes the work that refuses to explain itself, and tries to explain it anyway.
