Max Beckmann (Leipzig, 1884 - New York, 1950) is one of the most outstanding German artists of the 20th century. Although he was initially close to Expressionism and New Objectivity, Beckmann developed a personal and independent style of painting, with a realist bent but full of symbolic resonances, which stood as a vigorous testimony to the society of his time. The exhibition will be presented in autumn 2018 at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and subsequently at the CaixaForum headquarters in Barcelona, -from 20 February to 28 May 2019, and has been curated by Tomás Llorens. The exhibition, and this publication that reports on it, presents a thematic tour in which to present his work in two sections: the period he lived in Germany from the years before the First World War, when he began to be publicly recognised, until the rise of fascism in the 1930s, when he was expelled from the Frankfurt art school where he taught and was prevented from exhibiting his works in public; and secondly, Beckmann's years in Amsterdam and the United States, where he lived after being forced to leave Germany. Max Beckmann, figures of exile is structured around four metaphors related to exile, understood not only literally, but as an existential condition of modern man: Masks, focused on the loss of identity associated with the circumstance of exile; Electric Babylon, on the vertigo of the modern city as the capital of exile; The Long Goodbye, which raises the equivalence between exile and death; and The Sea, a metaphor for infinity, its seduction and its estrangement.
Texts by Tomás Llorens.
Catalogue sponsored by the Abertis Foundation
Spanish
Dimensions: 21 x 27 cm (width x height). 210 pages. Soft cover
ISBN: 9788417173203
