MAX PECHSTEIN (1881-1955)

Hermann Max Pechstein was born on December 31, 1881, in Zwickau, into a working-class family headed by his father, a textile-mill craftsman. Drawn to art early on, he apprenticed as a decorative painter from 1896 to 1900 before enrolling at Dresden’s School of Applied Arts and, from 1902, studying under Otto Gussmann at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His academic grounding—unique among his future peers—laid a solid foundation for the bold, expressive work that would follow.

In 1906 Erich Heckel invited Pechstein to join Die Brücke, the pioneering Expressionist collective, and he quickly became one of its most active members. Exposure to ethnographic wood carvings in Dresden in 1905 spurred his first woodcuts, and travels to Italy (1907) and Paris (1908)—where he befriended the Fauvist Kees van Dongen—expanded his palette and compositional daring. After relocating to Berlin in 1908, he co-founded the New Secession in 1910, serving as its chairman and gaining acclaim for richly colored prints inspired by Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves.

With the outbreak of World War I, Pechstein’s peripatetic life took him from internment in Japan to service on the Western Front in 1916. In the revolution’s aftermath, he aligned with radical socialist art groups—the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the November Group—before accepting a professorship at the Berlin Academy in 1922, where he influenced a new generation of modernists.

The Nazi regime’s rise in 1933 marked a dark chapter: Pechstein was barred from exhibiting, fired from his teaching post, and branded a “degenerate” artist, with 326 paintings removed from German museums and sixteen displayed in the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition. He spent the war years in rural Pomerania, only to be reinstated in 1945 and later honored with numerous awards before his death in West Berlin on June 29, 1955.

Over his career, Pechstein produced some 421 lithographs, 315 woodcuts and linocuts, and 165 intaglio prints, alongside hundreds of paintings, cementing his reputation as a master of German Expressionism and a pivotal figure in 20th-century art.