Max Pechstein

Max Pechstein (born Dec. 31, 1881, Zwickau, Ger.—died June 29, 1955, Berlin) was a painter and printmaker, who was a leading member of the group of German Expressionist artists known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”). He is best known for his paintings of nudes and landscapes.

Pechstein began his artistic career working as an apprentice to a decorator from 1896 to 1900. He attended art school in Dresden, Ger., from 1900 to 1906. 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.