Max Beckmann: Dream of Life

by Max Beckmann, Cornelia Homburg, Reinhard Spieler

"Art serves understanding, not entertainment," reads one of Max Beckmann's dictums. Beckmann's oeuvre, widely acknowledged to be some of the most significant German art of the twentieth century, contains a wealth of existential and contemporary historical convictions and questions. This representative selection of some 60 figurative paintings done between 1917 and the artist's death in 1950 unfolds the entire panorama of his career, from violent works...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3775716955
• ISBN13: 9783775716956
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Hatje Cantz
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 2.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.5" x 12.7"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A new insight on a great artist

This book is the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Zentrum Klee in Bern, Switzerland, in 2006. The idea of the exhibition, as pointed out in the beginning of the book, was to confront Beckmann's art to Klee's (the museum's Klee holdings are the largest in the world).This idea is not present here, since the catalogue is entirely centered on Beckmann, leaving Klee out. It is a good survey of Beckmann's art, divided in several themes (Beckmann and music, Beckmann and the circus, Beckmann and women, Beckmann and nature...)and enables the reader to view some rarely seen aspects of the artist's oeuvre (I, for one, did not know he had painted still lives), as well as some of his celebrated self-portraits. One shortcoming, though: the quality of the illustrations could have been better.