Background
Max Pechstein was born on December 31, 1881 in Zwickau, Germany. He was the son of a craftsman who worked in a textile mill.
Max Pechstein was born on December 31, 1881 in Zwickau, Germany. He was the son of a craftsman who worked in a textile mill.
Max attended art school in Dresden, Germany, from 1900 to 1906.
Early contact with the art of Vincent van Gogh stimulated Pechstein's development toward expressionism. Pechstein began his artistic career working as an apprentice to a decorator from 1896 to 1900.
In 1906 Erich Heckel invited him to join Die Brücke, a group of art students that had been founded in 1905. At the time, Pechstein was painting in an Impressionist style. However, his association with the members of Die Brücke and his exposure to the works of Henri Matisse led Pechstein to begin to use vigorous brush strokes and jarring combinations of unmixed colours, as in his painting Indian and Woman (1910). He frequently painted with Heckel and fellow Die Brücke member Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
In 1908 Pechstein moved from Dresden to settle in Berlin, where he showed his work at the Berliner Sezession, an exhibiting society, the following year. In 1910 he became one of the founders of the Neue Sezession (“New Secession”), an association of artists who disagreed with the policies of the Sezession. In his works of this period he adopted more simple compositions and sombre colours. Like the other Die Brücke artists, Pechstein had an interest in the art of non-European cultures. In 1914 he traveled to Palau in the western Pacific, where he painted exotic subjects in a deliberately “primitive” manner.
Perhaps because of the more conservative style of his work, Pechstein received wide public recognition before the other Die Brücke artists; the 1920s were the height of his popularity. In 1922 he took a teaching position at the Berlin Academy. He was forced to resign when the Nazis declared his work “degenerate” in 1933, but he regained his post after World War II. His late work, however, lacked the vigour of his earlier style. He died in West Berlin. He is buried on the Evangelischer Friedhof Alt-Schmargendorf in Berlin.
Bank of a Lake
1910Dancer in the Mirror
1923Dancer (Pair of Dancers)
1909Dawn
1911Die Schwalben sammeln sich (Ückeritz i. Pommern)
1949Farmhouses in the Morning
1927Girl on a Green Sofa with a Cat
1910In der Brandungswelle
1949Irises in Evening Shadows
1925Kornpuppen
1922Leba
1922Modellpause
1925Rauchender Schweizer
1923Self-Portrait with Death
1920Stillende Mutter
1927Sunset over the Blue Bridge
1922The Masked Woman
1910The yellow and black jersey
1909unknown title
Zwei Fischer mit Netz
1923Quotations: "We desire to achieve to the socialist republic not only the recovery of the conditions of art, but also the beginning of a unified artistic area for our time."
He was a member of the Die Brücke group.