From the glitzy decadence of Weimar cabarets to the gut-wrenching horrors of Nazi oppression, Beckmann's art is a rollercoaster ride through the human psyche. His self-portraits? They're like staring into a funhouse mirror of the soul, folks. And don't get me started on those triptychs - they're medieval altarpieces on steroids, packed with more symbolism than a Dan Brown novel.

Beckmann's not just painting pretty pictures; he's dissecting the human condition with the precision of a surgeon and the wild abandon of a jazz improviser. Whether it's "The Night" screaming silent terrors or "Birds' Hell" giving Hieronymus Bosch a run for his money, Beckmann's work grabs you by the collar and doesn't let go. It's expressionism with teeth, realism with a fever dream twist, and modernism that gives a nod to the old masters while blazing its own trail. So buckle up, art lovers - this ain't your grandma's still life collection. Welcome to the wild, wonderful, and slightly unhinged world of Max Beckmann.

Not by his own account — although he's often classified as an Expressionist, Beckmann rejected the term and the movement itself, aligning instead with New Objectivity, a harder-edged reaction against Expressionism's introverted emotionalism.

Their sheer number and psychological intensity are rivaled only by Rembrandt and Picasso — Beckmann used his own face across decades as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry into the self, making his self-portraits a continuous visual diary of a life lived through war, exile, and reinvention.

Fundamentally — his traumatic service as a volunteer medical orderly triggered a dramatic shift from academically correct realism to the distorted figures and compressed space that define his mature style, reflecting an altered vision of both himself and humanity.

Because Hitler's regime viewed modern art as a threat — in 1937 the government confiscated more than 500 of Beckmann's works from German museums and displayed several in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, having already dismissed him from his teaching post and branded him a "cultural Bolshevik."

Yes — some of his major works, including Bar and Brown, later surfaced in the Gurlitt trove, a vast Nazi-era art collection discovered in a Munich apartment in 2012, and remain under active scrutiny by historians and police for their wartime provenance.

He reinvented the religious triptych — a structure inherited from medieval altar painting — and repurposed it as a modern allegorical form addressing contemporary catastrophe, producing some of his most powerful works while in Amsterdam exile.