Max Beckmann was a German painter widely regarded as one of the major figures of the Expressionist and New Objectivity movements. In many of his paintings Beckmann melded reality with fantasy, producing a world in which strange women and immoral businessmen mingle with nightmarish creatures, as seen his work Bird’s Hell (1938). “I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this,” he once said. Born on February 12, 1884 in Leipzig, Germany, as a young man he studied the works of Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Peter Paul Rubens. Beckmann served as a medic during World War I, his distorted angles, cynical self...