...Beckmann had been a prominent and very successful artist in Germany during the Weimar years, in the 1920's. He traveled in high cultural circles, had patrons for his art, and was considered the avatar of German Expressionism.
His paintings from that period are quite beautiful, but less disturbing than his very powerful paintings from the 1930's. In the 1930's more than 500 of his works were removed from German museums by the Nazis, because his art was considered "degenerate."
He was fired from his "day job" as an art professor at a Frankfurt University in 1937, and emigrated from Germany to Amsterdam in 1938, the year this painting was produced. There he lived in relative poverty and obscurity. In 1944, the Germans who were then occupying the Netherlands attempted to draft him into the Nazi army even though he was in his sixties, but somehow he managed to avoid it.
After the war, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Washington University in Saint Louis - many of his painting are in Saint Louis museums - and also worked in New York.
He had a heart attack on Fifth Avenue in New York, a few blocks away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and died.
I personally regard him as one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and am always struck by the power of his works. In the foyer of the escalator in the Museum of Modern Art, when one goes up to the 5th floor, his 1932 triptych "Departure" is displayed, painted during the last days of the Weimar Republic as the Nazis were rising. I cannot ascend those stairs and look at this amazing, if disturbing, triptych without being struck with powerful emotions.
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