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35-744: The Seven Sacraments Altarpiece is a fixed-wing triptych by the Early Netherlandish artist Rogier van der Weyden and his workshop. It was painted from 1445 to 1450, probably for a church in Poligny ( Max J. Friedländer claimed that it was commissioned by the Bishop Jean Chevrot), and is now in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp . It depicts the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. On

70-426: A dramatic transformation of his style from academically correct depictions to a distortion of both figure and space, reflecting his altered vision of himself and humanity. He is known for the self-portraits painted throughout his life, their number and intensity rivaled only by those of Rembrandt and Picasso . Well-read in philosophy and literature, Beckmann also contemplated mysticism and theosophy in search of

105-475: A horn that the artist holds as if it were a telescope by which he intends to explore the darkness surrounding him. The tight framing of the figure within the boundaries of the canvas emphasize his entrapment. Art historian Cornelia Stabenow terms the painting "the most melancholy, but also the most mystifying, of his self-portraits". Many of Beckmann's late paintings are displayed in American museums. He exerted

140-708: A major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art , the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964–65 (with an excellent catalogue by Peter Selz ), and MoMA's prominent display of the triptych Departure , his work was little seen in much of the United States for decades. His 1984 centenary was marked in the New York area only by a modest exhibit at Nassau County 's suburban art museum. The Saint Louis Art Museum holds

175-573: A niche market of German and Austrian collectors. In 1921, Beckmann signed an exclusive contract with the print-dealer J. B. Neumann in Berlin. In 1938, he had the first of numerous exhibitions at Curt Valentin ’s Buchholz Gallery, New York. Today, Beckmann's large paintings routinely sell for more than $ 1 million, and his self-portraits generally command the highest prices. In 2001, Ronald Lauder paid $ 22.5 million at Sotheby's New York for Beckmann's Self-Portrait with Horn (1938), and displayed it at

210-625: A professorship at the Brooklyn Museum Art School . Beckmann suffered from angina pectoris and died after Christmas 1950, struck down by a heart attack at the corner of 69th Street and Central Park West in New York City, not far from his apartment building. As the artist's widow recalled, he was on his way to see one of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Beckmann had a one-man show at

245-453: A profound influence on such American painters as Philip Guston and Nathan Oliveira , and, indeed, on Boston Expressionism , the art movement that later expanded nationally and is now called American Figurative Expressionism . His posthumous reputation perhaps suffered from his very individual artistic path; like Oskar Kokoschka , he defies the convenient categorization that provides themes for critics, art historians and curators. Other than

280-445: A very personal but authentic version of modernism , one with a healthy deference to traditional forms. Beckmann reinvented the religious triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into an allegory of contemporary humanity. From his beginnings in the fin de siècle to the period after World War II , Beckmann reflected an era of radical changes in both art and history in his work. Many of Beckmann's paintings express

315-727: A wider public for the first time. A large-scale Beckmann retrospective was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2002) and Tate Modern in London (2003). In 2011, the Städel in Frankfurt devoted an entire room to the artist in its newly fitted permanent exhibition of modern art. A Max Beckmann Gesellschaft was first established by Wilhelm Hausenstein , Benno Reifenberg  [ de ] and others. The Max Beckmann Archiv

350-678: Is the neuter plural of δίπτυχος ( díptychos ) ' double-folded ' . The triptych form appears in early Christian art, and was a popular standard format for altar paintings from the Middle Ages onwards. Its geographical range was from the eastern Byzantine churches to the Celtic churches in the west. During the Byzantine period, triptychs were often used for private devotional use, along with other relics such as icons. Renaissance painters such as Hans Memling and Hieronymus Bosch used

385-622: The German-American painter and printmaker Werner Drewes ), and at the Brooklyn Museum . He came to St. Louis at the invitation of Perry T. Rathbone , director of the Saint Louis Art Museum . Rathbone arranged for Washington University to hire Beckmann as an art teacher, filling a vacancy left by Philip Guston , who had taken a leave. The first Beckmann retrospective in the United States took place in 1948 at

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420-598: The Neue Galerie in New York. In 2017, an anonymous bidder paid the record sum of $ 45.8 million for Beckmann's Hölle der Vögel (Birds' Hell) (1938) at Christie's in London; this was also a new world record for a German Expressionism artwork. In 2022, Self-Portrait Yellow-Pink (1943) sold at a Berlin auction for 20 million euros ($ 20.7 million), a price that appears to be a record for an art auction in Germany. Several important works by Beckmann were discovered in

455-571: The Saint Louis Art Museum published Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings , by Lynette Roth. It is a comprehensive look at the Beckmann paintings at SLAM, the largest collection of them in the world, and places both artist and works in a broader context. Although Beckmann is considered an important 20th-century artist, he has never been a household name, and his works have mostly appealed to

490-652: The Venice Biennale of 1950, the year of his death. also in that final year of 1950 he painted the work Falling Man which is considered both a reflection on mortality and eerily predictive of the jumpers and other doomed persons falling from the World Trade Center Towers during the September 11 attacks . Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting ; instead, he took up and advanced

525-703: The " Self ". As a true painter-thinker, he strove to find the hidden spiritual dimension in his subjects (Beckmann's 1948 Letters to a Woman Painter provides a statement of his approach to art). Beckmann enjoyed great success and official honors during the Weimar Republic . In 1925, he was selected to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt . Some of his most famous students included Theo Garve, Leo Maillet and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky . In 1927, he received

560-485: The 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and social criticism, coinciding with the rise of nazism in Germany. Max Beckmann was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig , Saxony . From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. His traumatic experiences of World War I , in which he volunteered as a medical orderly, coincided with

595-682: The City Art Museum, Saint Louis. In St. Louis, Morton D. May became his patron and, already an avid amateur photographer and painter, a student of the artist. May later donated much of his large collection of Beckmann's works to the St. Louis Art Museum. Beckmann also helped him learn to appreciate Oceanian and African art. After stops in Denver and Chicago, he and Quappi took an apartment at 38 West 69th Street in Manhattan . In 1949 he obtained

630-906: The Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf ; the National Gallery in Berlin acquired his painting The Bark and, in 1928, purchased his Self-Portrait in Tuxedo . By the early 1930s, a series of major exhibitions, including large retrospectives at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim (1928) and in Basel and Zurich (1930), together with numerous publications, showed

665-724: The agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic 's cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate. His Self-Portrait with Horn (1938), painted during his exile in Amsterdam, demonstrates his use of symbols. Musical instruments are featured in many of his paintings; in this case,

700-714: The end of the war, 70 artists had created 460 triptychs. Among the most prolific were Violet Oakley , Nina Barr Wheeler , and Hildreth Meiere . The triptych format has been used in non-Christian faiths, including, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. For example: the triptych Hilje-j-Sherif displayed at the National Museum of Oriental Art , Rome, Italy, and a page of the Qur'an at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul, Turkey, exemplify Ottoman religious art adapting

735-576: The form. Sculptors also used it. Triptych forms also allow ease of transport. From the Gothic period onward, both in Europe and elsewhere, altarpieces in churches and cathedrals were often in triptych form. One such cathedral with an altarpiece triptych is Llandaff Cathedral . The Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp , Belgium, contains two examples by Rubens , and Notre Dame de Paris is another example of

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770-556: The high esteem in which Beckmann was held. His fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler , whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state. In 1933, the Nazi government called Beckmann a "cultural Bolshevik" and dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937, the government confiscated more than 500 of his works from German museums, putting several on display in

805-612: The largest public collection of Beckmann paintings in the world and held a major exhibition of his work in 1998. Since the late 20th century, Beckmann's work has gained an increasing international reputation. There have been retrospectives and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (1995) and the Guggenheim Museum (1996) in New York, and the principal museums of Rome (1996), Valencia (1996), Madrid (1997), Zurich (1998), Munich (2000), Frankfurt (2006) and Amsterdam (2007). In Spain and Italy, Beckmann's work has been accessible to

840-403: The last rites. The side panels also depict the altarpiece's commissioners, along with some portrait heads only added shortly before the work was completed. Two coats of arms (probably that of the commissioners) (left: "sable" chevron on "or" field; right: "argent" tower on "sable" field) are painted in the spandrels of the painting's inner frame. Triptych Beyond its association with art,

875-499: The left panel are baptism, confirmation and confession and on the right hand panel the ordination of a priest, marriage and the last rites. The central panel (possibly the only autograph part of the work) is dominated by a crucifixion in the foreground, with the sacrament of the Eucharist in the background. Angels hover over each sacrament with scrolls, with clothes colour-matched to the sacraments, from white for baptism to black for

910-464: The motif. Likewise, Tibetan Buddhists have used it in traditional altars. Although strongly identified as a religious altarpiece form, triptychs outside that context have been created, some of the best-known examples being works by Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon . When Bacon's 1969 triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud , was sold in 2013 for $ 142.4 million, it was the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction at that time. That record

945-631: The notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich . The day after Hitler's radio speech about degenerate art in 1937, Beckmann left Germany with his second wife, Quappi, for the Netherlands. For ten years, Beckmann lived in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam , failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the United States. In 1944, the Germans attempted to draft him into the army, although

980-507: The sixty-year-old artist had suffered a heart attack. The works completed in his Amsterdam studio were even more powerful and intense than the ones of his master years in Frankfurt. They included several large triptychs , which stand as a summation of Beckmann's art. In 1947, Beckmann took a position at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University . During the last three years of his life, he taught at Washington University (alongside

1015-569: The term is sometimes used more generally to connote anything with three parts, particularly if integrated into a single unit. The word triptych was formed in English by compounding the prefix tri- with the word diptych . Diptych is borrowed from the Latin diptycha , which itself is derived from the Late Greek δίπτυχα ( díptycha ) ' pair of writing tablets ' . δίπτυχα

1050-500: The tradition of figurative painting. He greatly admired not only Cézanne and Van Gogh , but also Blake , Rembrandt , and Rubens , as well as Northern European artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance , such as Bosch , Bruegel , and Matthias Grünewald . His style and method of composition are partially rooted in the imagery of medieval stained glass. Engaging with the genres of portraiture, landscape, still life, and history painting , his diverse body of work created

1085-408: The use of triptych in architecture. The form is echoed by the structure of many ecclesiastical stained glass windows . The triptych form's transportability was exploited during World War Two when a private citizens' committee in the United States commissioned painters and sculptors to create portable three-panel hinged altarpieces for use by Christian and Jewish U.S. troops for religious services. By

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1120-535: Was a German painter, draftsman , printmaker , sculptor , and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity ( Neue Sachlichkeit ), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By

1155-512: Was broken in May 2015 by $ 179.4 million for Pablo Picasso 's 1955 painting Les Femmes d’Alger . A photographic triptych is a common style used in modern commercial artwork. The photographs are usually arranged with a plain border between them. The work may consist of separate images that are variants on a theme, or may be one larger image split into three. Max Beckmann Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 27, 1950)

1190-547: Was established in 1977 and is under the auspices of the Bavarian State Painting Collections . In 1996, Piper, Beckmann's German publisher, released the third and last volume of the artist's letters, whose wit and vision rank him among the strongest writers of the German tongue. His essays, plays and, above all, his diaries are also unique historical documents. A selection of Beckmann's writings

1225-449: Was issued in the United States by University of Chicago Press in 1996. In 2003, Stephan Reimertz , Parisian novelist and art historian, published a biography of Max Beckmann. It presents many photos and sources for the first time. The biography reveals Beckmann's contemplations of writers and philosophers such as Dostoyevsky , Schopenhauer , Nietzsche , and Richard Wagner . The book has not yet been translated into English. In 2015,

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