Max Beckmann, Italienerin (Italian Woman) (1946)- New Objectivity

Max Beckmann painted this vibrant oil portrait, Italienerin in Amsterdam in 1946. His dealer, Curt Valentin, who was largely responsible for establishing Beckmann's reputation in the States, gave it as a birthday present to his friend, Perry Rathbone, the director of the City Art Museum, St. Louis, in 1947. Perry Rathbone, who met Beckmann through Valentin, was instrumental in organising the artist's emigration to the States in 1947, as well as in securing Beckmann's first teaching post at Washington University, St. Louis.

In his diary entries of 7th and 10th July 1946, Beckmann refers to Italienerin as being finished. The signature and date were added later by the artist, probably at the time when he sold the work to Curt Valentin. Several months after completing this work, in 1947, Beckmann left Amsterdam, where he fled from Germany with his wife Quappi tel years earlier. His Amsterdam paintings, including the present work, are often characterised by a long, narrow format, the constraints of which reflet the artist's feeling of confinement and discomfort during his years of exile. Despite the tension and grim facts of everyday existence during and immediately after the war, this period was one of the most productive and innovative in Beckmann's career.

Max Beckman 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.

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 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.

  

All prints are made using archival art stocks and UV pigment inks to give up to 200 years life. Prints are sold unframed and unmounted.