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(Hermann) Max Pechstein

    Hermann Max Pechstein was born in Eckersbach, Zwickau on December 31, 1881. From 1896 to 1900, he apprenticed as a decorator in Zwickau. He eventually moved to Dresden to attend the Kunstgewerbeschule. Pechstein became friends with the architect Wilhelm Kreis and the painter Otto Gussmann. While in Dresden, Pechstein received a few decorative commissions. From 1902 to 1906, Pechstein was under the tutelage of Gussmann at the Dresden Kunstakademie. The year, 1906, became a turning point in Pechstein’s life. Kreis introduced Pechstein to Erich Heckel, who asked him to join the newly formed art group, Die Brucke. He often joined them in their communal drawing sessions (en plein air-a French term meaning “open air” or on site painting). One of these sessions led the group to paint naked sunbathers at the Moritzburg lakes in the summer of 1910. When he was not painting communally with the group, he painted at the studios of Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Pechstein’s painting, Girl in Red at a Table, shows the influence the other members of Die Brucke had on him.

    In 1907, Pechstein received the prestigious Dresden Kunstakademie Rome prize. He then went to Paris, where he convinced Kees von Dongen, a Fauvist painter, to join Die Brucke. The Fauvist influence on Pechstein’s art can be seen in his painting, Young Woman. In 1911, three yeas after Pechstein moved to Berlin, his fellow group members joined him there. After two years of carrying the group’s paintings, the Berlin Secession rejected their works. Pechstein then helped form the Neue Sezession, of which he was made chairman.

    Pechstein was forced to leave the group in 1912, after he had displayed some artwork at the Berlin Secession without the approval of the other members in Die Brucke. This turn of events eventually turned out to be a good thing for Pechstein. Unlike Kirchner, Heckel, and a few of the other group members, he had never completely broke away from traditional painting styles and this led him to greater success earlier than other members. One critic stated, “[Pechstein was] the purest example and the strongest representative of the extensive Expressionist movement” and that he was “also the leader of the Dresden group” (Turner 311). It may have been his success that also helped to estrange him from his friends in the group.

    Before World War I, Pechstein became interested in woodcuts and “primitive art” like many of his friends. He traveled to Palau in the South Seas, before the war began; yet when the war started, he became an internee in Japan. He eventually returned to Germany to be sent to the Western front in 1916. After the war, he joined two politically active groups, Arbeitsrat fur kunst and the Novembergruppe. His artistic style changed little during this time, even though he was passionately involved with politics.

    During the 1920s, Pechstein’s life was relatively good. In 1922, he joined the Preussiche Akademie der Kunste and became a professor at the Hochschule fur Bilende Kunste in Berlin. In 1926, the German government asked him to design a five-part stained-glass window for the Internationales Arbeitsamt in Geneva. Because of his political activity, Pechstein soon became a victim of the Nazis. In 1933, the Nazi regime forbade Pechstein from painting and exhibiting, took away his teaching position, and in 1934, they expelled him from the Preussiche akademie der Kunste. After World War II, his teaching position was reinstated in West Berlin and he was awarded many honours before his death. Hermann Max Pechstein died in West Berlin on June 19, 1955. Since his death, his popularity as an artist has declined and his Die Brucke friends have been receiving the majority of the scholarship and public attention.