The Prints Of Max Beckmann
Without a question, one of the most significant and influential artists of the 20th century was Max Beckmann. He was a talented printmaker in addition to being a painter. Max Beckmann produced a total of 156 drypoints, 72 lithographs, and 16 woodcuts between 1914 and 1924, making printmaking the primary media he used during this pivotal period in his artistic growth. He didn’t start concentrating on painting until 1924.
The economic upheaval of those years made prints simpler to sell for Beckmann than they were for many other German painters of the day, including Dix and Grosz, and they were also particularly suited to the artist’s social portraiture and subjects. Beckmann used a needle to etch the plate, producing bold, increasingly angular lines and curves that gradually reflected the division of the interwar era as well as the frantic activity and psychological tension of modern life.
In his Artistic Confession published in 1918, Beckmann wrote: “the more fiercely my despair about life burns within me, the more determined I become…to grab the disgusting, throbbing monster that is existence and to suppress it, to imprison it, to throttle it in sharp cutting lines and shapes”.