"Kinder am Fenster"

(1922)

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"Kinder am Fenster", 1922, drypoint on Japan paper, 322x227mm; 12 3/4" x 9", full margins. Edition of 50. Signed in pencil, lower right and annotated in pencil, lower center.  A very good, richly-inked impression [Hofmaier 237].

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was the most important German printmaker and painter between the two World Wars. Beckmann was born in Leipzig and studied at the Weimar Academy of Art, where he was influenced by Hans von Marees.  In 1906, he won an important prize and was admitted to the Berlin Secession, although he resigned from the Secession in 1911 and did not show a progressive perspective until shortly before World War I.  The shattering horror of the spectacle of that war provided Beckmann with the involuntary basis for his later nightmarish imagery. From 1918 onward Beckmann moved away from the Berlin Impressionist influence and steadily acquired the bold, spatially compressed and often times completely enigmatic symbolism that distinguish his style.

Beckmann's prints of the middle 1920s have been identified by some with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style, a hard, socially conscious realism then practiced by George Grosz, Alexander Kanoldt and Otto Dix, who portrayed the economic disaster and human depravity that was wide spread in postwar Germany. Beckmann's prints are a personal meditation on evils that seemed to be gathering in such force and number that they could only at best be expressed symbolically in the early years of Hitler's Germany.  "Kinder am Fenster" [Children At the Window], however,  records Beckmann's childhood in Leipzig showing himself as a boy talking to a friend and discussing the street activities below, but with the reflective consciousness of his Neue Sachlichkeit mid 20s style.

This Beckmann is in a classic beveled 25 1/4" x 29 5/8" distressed silver blackened with dark brown patina crackled frame. The polished inner lip is black spotted silver.    The outer sawdust denim, middle ivory black beveled accent and inner heather brown rag mats are acid and lignin free and are protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO .... SOLD