Max Beckmann

This book focuses on a single painting from several points of view. Painted by Max Beckmann in 1944, the 'Portrait of the Lütjens Family' became part of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen collection in 2009. Alongside personal recollections and documents, the book contains the results of the art-historical research into the background to the work and the technical research into the materials used.

One of the most important German artists of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann was labeled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis and chose exile. His artistic production encompassed the realism and figural themes of his early works to the provocatively blunt portraiture, critical urban views, and richly layered symbolic works for which he is now universally recognized. Although he was a prolific writer, his written work has never before been collected and translated into English. Beckmann is known for the depth, pungency, and tremendous sensuous force of his works; only in the last twenty years have we come to learn more about his personal life. Self-Portrait in Words maps out Beckmann's life and draws attention to the occasions on or for which he produced his writings, to the importance writing had for him as a form of expression, and to both the contemporary and personal references of his ideas and images.

The catalogue to an exhibition of Beckmann's work presented at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo - the first at an American museum in over a decade - this book explores, in essays and full-color reproductions, the artist's fruitful years in exile. Barbara Stehle-Akhtar discusses the critical reception of Beckmann's work in the United States and its stylistic development during this period. Reinhard Spieler's essay probes Beckmann's nine completed triptychs, his sweeping masterpieces that express both the mood of the times and the artist's own worldview. Fellow emigre Stephan Lackner provides a reminiscence of his friendship with and support of Beckmann. Completing the volume are a personal interpretation by contemporary artist Eric Fischl of Beckmann's first triptych, Departure, as well as writings by Beckmann that eloquently convey his thoughts on aesthetics and creativity.