Biography
A key Expressionist painter of the early 20th century, Max Pechstein produced decorative and colorful paintings that borrowed from Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and the Fauves. As a member of Die Brücke, a group of German Expressionists who took a primitivist approach to painting, Pechstein worked closely with Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. He travelled to Palau in the South Pacific in 1914, after which his paintings increasingly displayed elements of Primitivism, such as thick black lines and angular figures. Pechstein was also a prolific printmaker, making over 900 prints over the course of his career. Instrumental in founding the Novembergruppe in 1918, a left-wing artists’ group demanding artist involvement in creating social policies, Pechstein was later denounced by the Nazis and hundreds of his paintings were removed from German museums.