Герман Макс Пехштейн: Өмір және шығармашылығы

German painter

Hermann Max Pechstein (31 December 1881 – 29 June 1955) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and a member of the Die Brücke group. He fought on the Western Front during World War I and his art was classified as Degenerate Art by the Nazis. More than 300 paintings were removed from German Museums during the Nazi era.

Pechstein was born in Zwickau, the son of a craftsman who worked in a textile mill. The family of eight lived on the father's salary. An early contact with the art of Vincent van Gogh stimulated Pechstein's development toward expressionism. He first worked as a decorator in his home town before enrolling at the School of Applied Arts and then at the Royal Art Academy in Dresden, where he met the painter Otto Gussman and the architect Wilhelm Kreis. It was here, starting in 1902, that he became a pupil of Gussmann; a relationship that lasted until 1906 when Pechstein met Erich Heckel and was invited to join the art group Die Brücke. He was the only member to have received formal art training. He was an active member of the Brücke until 1910 and often worked alongside Brücke painters creating a homogeneous style of this period. In 1905 he was in Dresden where the museum of ethnology showed wood carvings from the South Seas. As a result he developed his first woodcut. In 1907 Pechstein traveled to Italy to receive an award, and upon his return in 1908 spent time in Paris where he met the Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen whom he persuaded to join Die Brücke. Later that year Pechstein moved to Berlin (a move that fellow painters were to make in the following three years). After being categorically rejected from exhibiting in the Berlin Secession in 1910, he helped to found and became chairman of the New Secession and gained recognition for his decorative and colorful prints that were inspired by the art of Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves. In 1912, after years of rising tensions, Pechstein was expelled from the Brücke after exhibiting some of his work in the aforementioned Berlin Secession all by himself and without paintings of other members of the Brücke. In July 2021, France decided to restitute to the heirs of Hugo Simon the Pechstein entitled Nus dans un paysage. In 2023, Christie's brokered a settlement with the heirs of Robert Graetz, a Jewish textile industrialist and art collector who was deported and murdered by the Nazis, concerning Still Life With a Cup, which Graetz's daughter sold as a refugee in South Africa. He was a prolific printmaker, producing 421 lithographs, 315 woodcuts and linocuts, and 165 intaglio prints, mostly etchings.

He was married to Charlotte Karpolat from 1911 until 1923 and later was married to Marta Möller.

At a 1999 Sotheby's auction, The Yellow Mask I (1910), the portrait of a woman wearing a yellow mask, was sold for $1.37 million. In 2008, Zirkus mit Dromedaren (c. 1920) was auctioned for £1.9 million in London.